1. What Strong Collaboration Means for Scholarly
Publishing
June 7, 2007
Larry Sanger
When I was asked to speak to you, the Society for Scholarly
Publishing, I have to admit that I found this puzzling, because I don’t
know anything about scholarly publishing. Why should someone
who knows so little about scholarly publishing be asked to give a
speech to the Society for Scholarly Publishing? That’s a paradox.
I found a similar paradox in an article by John Thompson in the
Chronicle of Higher Education from 2005. Thompson wrote: “academic
publishers can survive today only if they become something other
than academic publishers” (June 17, 2005).
The quote actually explains why I’m here. I’m here because I can tell
you about a way to become something other than academic
publishers. I suppose this is a little absurd, but as a philosopher, I am
trained to take joy in life’s little absurdities.
So I’m going to try to make the case that scholarly publishers should
start expert Web 2.0 projects. Here’s my plan for the talk.
• I’m going to begin by painting a picture, a vision of what
information online could look like in ten or twenty years. In
short, I’m going to build a castle in the air. But then I will try
to put a foundation underneath it.
• I’ll go over a number of examples of free encyclopedia projects
from which we can learn.
• Then I’ll draw out some general principles.

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• I’ll consider various business models for projects started by
scholarly publishers.
• Finally, I’ll give you some ideas for projects you might start.
Here’s the question I want to answer first: what might the world of
free vetted, reliable, edited information online look like in ten years?
What sort of free resources might we see? Suppose it’s the year 2017,
and we’re looking at the best-case scenario.
In the best-case scenario, the Encyclopedia of Life would be an
enormous success—it was recently announced, by the way, with a
commitment of $100 million in grants. It has articles on the 1.8
million named and known species on Earth, with a detailed article,
pictures, video where available, links to news articles, and various
other resources. Basically, if you want to know about a species, you
know where to go.
Next, consider the Citizendium, which you can think of as Wikipedia
with editors and real names. In the best-case scenario, it would have
added millions of articles in hundreds of languages, but unlike
Wikipedia itself, the articles have undergone a process of continual
improvement, and there are now hundreds of thousands of expert-
approved articles—and much other supporting information as well.
In 2007, you can find some information about virtually any topic you
like, on Wikipedia—but you’re not sure if you can trust it. In 2017,
you can find information on those same topics, but information that
you know has been checked by actual experts, on Citizendium.
So much for general encyclopedias. What about other kinds of
information? By 2017, the library digitization projects have gone
brilliantly. The entire contents of major libraries—millions of
volumes of both books and journals—have been digitized. Most
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copyrighted books still aren’t available for free viewing, except at
some libraries, but they make research much easier. And it is
possible for an individual to buy a subscription to services that give
you full-text searching of nearly every book and periodical you could
possibly want.
The advantages of digitization have finally come home to archives, in
2017. It is a rare archive that has not digitized its entire stock, and
made at least part of it available for free. So there are now enormous
vetted and well-tagged and -organized sets of free photographs,
video, and audio, which put Flickr and YouTube to shame.
Meanwhile, scholarly publishers have spearheaded countless
fascinating new scholarly projects, creating certain kinds of reference
and academic work for the first time ever—made possible by the
scale and dynamism of global collaboration.
I could go on, but I suspect you’ve heard it all before. Sure, it’s
exciting.
But one gets tired of all the “vision.” I do, anyway. Let’s come back
to Earth. I want to ask two practical questions.
• First, how can humanity possibly get from here to there?
• And second, what role might scholarly publishers play in
getting us from here to there?
It’s important, I think, to look at where you’ve been, if you want to
know how to get where you want to go. So, let’s look at a series of
free Internet encyclopedia projects, in roughly chronological order.
• First, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP) is one
of my favorite reference works. It lives online. Its articles are
excellent, high-level introductions to all sorts of philosophical
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topics. They’re written and updated by experts and the whole
production is edited by a veritable who’s who of contemporary
philosophers.
It’s a thing of beauty.
The problem with SEP, however, is that it got started in 1995
and, after a dozen years, still numbers its articles in the
hundreds, not the thousands. This is probably a function of
the fact that there just aren’t that many top experts on the
topics that SEP wants articles about.
They won’t assign an article to just anybody.
• Back in 2000, a peer-reviewed general encyclopedia project got
started, called Nupedia. I was its editor-in-chief and organizer.
Unlike SEP, Nupedia allowed anyone to volunteer to write an
article, but articles still had to be assigned by an editor. We had
a tiny budget and did manage to produce a few dozen articles
within a year or so, and the articles were very high-quality.
After a few years, particularly after I had to resign due to lack
of funding, the project withered away.
The problem was the same as with the Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy: slow pace of production. Here the problem was that
not enough people wanted to go through Nupedia’s extremely
rigorous, seven-step editorial process.
• It was when I was trying to think of a way to improve upon
Nupedia’s slow process that a friend told me about wikis—
websites that allow anybody to edit any page instantly. Without
even having seen a wiki, I saw that this could be the tool we
were looking for, to make a simpler and more open method of
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content development.
I guess many of you know what happened then. Wikipedia
took off, and it never added any credible method of approving
or certifying articles. In fact, without the influence of Nupedia,
Wikipedia became actually contemptuous of expertise.
Moreover, they didn’t require the use of real names, and they
never developed any effective ways of reining in abusive
behavior.
As a result, while Wikipedia is an amazingly huge and useful
resource, it remains of questionable reliability, and, as a
community, it is off-putting to many people online who might
be willing to contribute to a project like it.
• Next in our catalog of projects is the Encyclopedia of Earth
(EoE). This one got its start in the fall of 2005; I actually wrote
some of the original project plans and policy documents for it.
It’s a wiki encyclopedia devoted to everything concerning the
Earth’s environment.
But it differs from Wikipedia in several important ways. While
articles are not assigned by editors, a byline is given to what
authors happen to show up; a person has to be an expert on
some aspect of environmental studies in order to contribute;
and you can’t “watch the sausage being made,” that is, non-
contributors can’t see page histories or the wiki-wide “recent
changes” page.
As a result, there isn’t much actual collabortion going on on the
Encyclopedia of Earth. There is some, and they’re steadily
growing, but largely because they’re aggregating content, by
hand, from a number of different credible sources.
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• The Scholarpedia got its start in early 2006. I won’t say too
much about this because it’s somewhat similar to SEP and
EoE. It’s a specialized encyclopedia, concerning (at present)
certain topics within neuroscience, mathematics, and computer
science.
It differs from EoE, and from Wikipedia, in that the articles are
not open content; still, they are free to read.
Articles are written by some really excellent experts, and
reviewed by experts; as a result, however, like the philosophy
articles in SEP, the articles are not really accessible to non-
experts.
Also, it uses a wiki, but there is very little actual collaboration
going on. And as a result, there are only a few hundred articles
developed, though I’m sure they’re quite excellent articles.
• Next, imagine a free, specialized encyclopedia “strictly by the
experts,” like SEP, EoE, and Scholarpedia. But imagine that it
had $100 million to spend. Then you’d have the recently-
announced Encyclopedia of Life—the encyclopedia project
aiming to list 1.8 million species. It’s hard to say exactly how it
will work, but their FAQ says, “Unlike conventional
encyclopedias, where an editorial team sits down and writes the
entries, the Encyclopedia will be developed by bringing
together (‘mashing up’) content from a wide variety of sources.
This material will then be authenticated by scientists, so that
users will have authoritative information.”
I have no critical remarks about the Encyclopedia of Life to make,
because it doesn’t exist yet, and if you throw $100 million at a
publishing problem, there’s a good chance you’ll solve it. It’s
very exciting in any case.
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• The last example is one that started getting organized most
recently: the Citizendium, a project I first announced last
September, and which launched in a public beta version last
March. Think of it as Wikipedia with editors and real names.
As such, it occupies a unique niche.
It’s a general encyclopedia, and makes full use of the wiki
software and development model. Unlike several other
examples given so far, articles really are developed
collaboratively.
But, like them, it makes a special place for experts. We call
them “editors.” Our editors have two primary functions at
present. First, they can review and approve articles; second,
they can make decisions about questions of controversy, as
necessary. But they can and do also play the role of author. A
good part of our day-to-day authoring work on the wiki is done
by editors.
Nevertheless, we also invite contributions from the general
public, who work as authors, shoulder-to-shoulder with the
editors. You might think this would be a recipe for
expert/amateur conflict, but so far we’ve seen little of that.
The wiki has been under development for about seven months.
In that time, we have added
o about 1700 authors
o about 240 editors
o about 2000 articles
If we continue to grow—I mean, to increase our rate of growth
—as we have been, we should have hundreds of thousands of
articles within a few years. We have a similar amount of
content to what Wikipedia had after seven months—fewer
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actual articles, but our articles are longer, on average. We’ll also
be expanding the number of approved articles we have, which
right now is just over 20.
What, then, can we learn from these projects? Before I draw a few
lessons, I want to make a few stipulations.
I’m going to stipulate, first, that an encyclopedia is better the larger it
is and the more reliable it is: both quantity and quality.
Second, I also want to stipulate that the community that creates the
encyclopedia is also important; and the community is better if it is
not constantly engaged in acrimonious controversy.
Few of the encyclopedia projects we reviewed have grown very
rapidly. Wikipedia and Citizendium have done pretty well so far, on
that score. But the other projects grew slowly for various different
reasons.
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and Scholarpedia have grown
slowly, I think, mainly due to the fact that they are so exclusive. They
insist that article authors be not merely competent and
knowledgeable scholars, but actually distinguished in their fields.
If they were to expand the set of possible contributors, they would of
course have more contributors. My view is that it is only genuine
good old-fashioned elitism that can justify the exclusion of
competent scholars. I think this explains in part, by the way, why the
Citizendium has done rather better, in terms of numbers of articles
created, than the other expert-driven projects.
So I advance this principle: expand your base of contributors as
widely as is reasonable.
Nupedia grew too slowly primarily due to a complex workflow. I’ve
discovered time and time again that, when presented with a problem,
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scholars tend to want to create a new process, a new workflow, a new
committee, to deal with it. This might solve the problem, but it also
slows down production.
The lesson here is: radically simplify your workflow. A wiki is an
example, but only one example, of a tool that encourages a simple
workflow.
Next, consider those relatively recent projects that use wikis, but
which don’t really operate as wikis—here I think especially of the
Encyclopedia of Earth and Scholarpedia. They could, I think, grow much
more quickly, if they really were collaborative—that is, if they had a
relatively energized collaborative community.
Well, how do you energize a collaborative community? Several ways.
• First, don’t sign articles. Leave them unsigned. The reason is
that, if you do sign articles, a few things happen that make
collaboration difficult and unlikely. The author will discourage
and resent input from others. And others will avoid
collaborating on articles, because they don’t want to offend the
author.
• Second, for the same reason, actively discourage the idea of
exclusive personal control over articles. Even if the project’s
articles aren’t signed, some people will act as if an article he
started really is his own, and discourage others from
contributing. So you have to actually tell those people, “You
may have written a draft of this article, but it isn’t yours.”
• Third, positively encourage people to edit everyone else’s
submissions. There are various ways to do this. You can put it
in policy and help documents. You can have your most active
and distinguished authors ask for help with articles they’ve
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started. Editors can ask one author to help another author.
And so forth. Eventually, I think people will get the idea.
• Fourth and finally, something that the Encyclopedia of Earth does,
but which Scholarpedia does not do, is to use an open content
license. This also helps to build a more dynamic community,
because such a license is a guarantee to contributors that their
collective work will always be free; it won’t disappear when the
managing organization disappears. I think you might be
surprised at how important this is to some people.
It would be a huge mistake to think that experts and scholars are
unable to collaborate, Wikipedia-style. The Citizendium project has
demonstrated that the articles that result from such collaborations
can be truly wonderful.
Next, there is the problem of the lack of reliability, which I think is a
problem mainly with Wikipedia. Here, the solution I recommend has
made me a heretic in the Web 2.0 world, but it’s the obvious old-
fashioned one for everyone else: if you want to be sure that some
content is reliable, then you get experts to review your content. So,
find a place for experts.
The last problem I see is another problem of Wikipedia’s. Namely, it
has an off-putting community, due to its immaturity and failure to
enforce its own rules. Here, again, I recommend some heretical yet
old-fashioned solutions: have contributors identify themselves with
their real names, not pseudonyms, and, also, empower and require
moderators to enforce rules consistently.
So here is a run-down of the lessons learned from the free
encyclopedia projects listed above:
1. Expand your base of contributors as widely as is reasonable.
2. Radically simplify your workflow.
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3. Don’t sign articles.
4. Moreover, actively discourage the idea of personal ownership
of articles.
5. Positively encourage people to edit everyone else’s submissions.
6. Use an open content license.
7. Have contributors identify themselves with their real names,
not pseudonyms.
8. Require moderators to enforce rules consistently.
The only project that actually follows all of these principles is the
Citizendium. I guess that’s not surprising since I’m the editor of the
Citizendium and I wrote these principles. But I do practice what I
preach, in this case.
So, I know this is going to sound terribly immodest, but I guess what
I’m recommending is that you start projects like the Citizendium.
I can’t expect you to take this recommendation very seriously, partly
because the Citizendium is free, and you, as publishers, are in business
to make money.
But, you know, people do make money by publishing free stuff
online. I don’t, but other people do. Personally—and I know this
must sound bizarre—but I’m really not in it for the money myself.
The Citizendium is a non-profit, and I don’t expect to get rich, at least,
not off of this. Still, other people do get rich by publishing free stuff
online. Just think of the founders of Google, Yahoo, YouTube, and
MySpace.
Their business model, of course, is advertising. As you must know,
online advertising is increasingly lucrative. As to the ethics of the
thing, newspapers have been supported for years by advertising, and
only radicals have complained about the ethics of their advertising.
So, in principle, I personally don’t have a problem about supporting a
project with advertising.
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Still, you might wonder why Wikipedia, Citizendium, and virtually all
other of the encyclopedia projects I listed—except for Scholarpedia—
don’t use advertising. I think the main reason is that their organizers
and/or contributors hold the view that advertising equals corporate
bias and corporate control. I don’t personally hold this view, but I
respect it, and if it means I can’t have as many contributors, I will not
run advertisements.
Another business model, one that seems particularly viable in the
world of scholarly publishing, is the “pay-to-play” model. The idea
here is that if a university department wants to participate in some
scholarly project to produce free information, organized by a
publisher, then the department pays the publisher, and then the
faculty and grad students can participate. This basically is the “open
access” model, expropriated from journal publishing, and applied to
collaborative content production.
Another business model involves selling “premium content” to
subscribers—for scholarly publishers, this again is not a stretch. I
assume I don’t need to elaborate on this one, because it’s something
you already do as a matter of course.
Finally, a business model that is worth a try, though few people have
actually tried it, is a sort of patronage program. The idea is that, as a
publisher, you are hooked in to a large network of scholars. Suppose
you were to invite people to pay for free content, created by your
network?
In other words, you, as publishers, solicit donations—from
individuals and from institutions—and the donors can specify a few
details about what they want. For example, suppose they want to
support the creation of an anthology of important popular writings
about global warming. Then they approach you with the money, and
if it seems to be enough for the job, then you tap into your network,
wrangle the content, and publish a collection of essays. The essays
are free online; the funders get credit as patrons.
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I don’t know whether this is a viable model, but it seems like an
interesting way to pay for free, expert-produced content. I think it’s
worth a try. Eventually, perhaps very soon, the Citizendium will give it
a try, by the way. I’ve written an essay developing the idea. It’s
linked from larrysanger.org, and it’s called “The Role of Content
Brokers in the Era of Free Content.”
Finally, I promised you some ideas for projects. There are countless
interestingly different ideas for expert-led collaborations; I’ll give you
just two.
So, you’re an academic publishing house. Let me assume that you
think the collaboration train is leaving the station, and you want on.
What can you do to develop your firm’s expertise in this area, and
explore new business models? What sort of project should you start?
Here an idea: a literature review. But not just any old literature
review. A really thorough, comprehensive, and balanced review of
every part of the literature of a field. In other words, a
comprehensive account of the latest advances in the last, say, year.
It is very labor-intensive for just one person to create this sort of
overview of the literature even about some very narrow topic within
a given field.
But, of course, experts together know the literature of their fields far
better than any one of them knows it individually. Furthermore, if
they are writing summaries of the latest research, their summaries will
be far better if they can correct each others’ mistakes.
And bear in mind, also, that anyone who is a real expert in a field has
to keep up with the latest advances—they all have to go over a lot of
the same material, so they’re all doing the same thing. So a
collaboratively-written, comprehensive summary of the literature of a
field makes sense.
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I would absolutely love to see such reviews of the literature about my
own interests of philosophy, the Internet, and Irish traditional music.
I think it is only a matter of time before people start very regularly
producing literature reviews collaboratively. It could be done using a
wiki, and so wouldn’t be technically difficult to set up.
And, perhaps for obvious reasons, scholarly publishers are the
perfect organizations to spearhead (or help spearhead) such an effort.
For the next idea, let me give a little background.
There are many different ideas about collaboratively creating
supplementary research material related to classic, public domain
texts. Just think of the conjunction of three facts.
Fact one: most of the important classic texts in all fields have already
been digitized—and digitizing new versions of classic texts has been
automated and made cost-effective.
Fact two: access to these texts—and to a single version of a text—
can be virtually universal among scholars, since they’re virtually all on
the Internet.
Fact three: in recent years, scholars in large numbers have finally
begun to “get” the idea of strong, wiki-style collaboration.
What follows from these three facts is that it is possible for scholars
to work together in huge numbers on supplementary study materials
for classic, public domain texts. In itself, digital study aids for classic
and public domain texts are nothing new. The wonderful Perseus
Project is one prominent example. But the Perseus Project isn’t
really very strongly collaborative.
So here’s an idea that I have developed on the textop.org domain.
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Imagine a scholar working through a digital copy of Thomas Hobbes'
Leviathan, dividing it into chunks of approximately one paragraph in
length. Imagine the scholar labelling the chunks by function,
summarizing them, and placing them into a single outline, reordered,
beginning with the most abstract topics, like Metaphysics, and
working down to applied topics, such as Political Philosophy and
Philosophy of Law.
Imagine the scholar repeating this process, summarizing and as it
were filing away paragraphs of text for, say, the fifty most influential
works of philosophy, with all the chunks of texts summarized and
collated into the same outline. This would require a scholar on the
order of 5-10 years, depending on diligence. But if many scholars
were to work on the project together, the amount of time required
would be a fraction.
Next imagine doing this sort of text collation for other fields beyond
philosophy, and texts in languages other than English. The result
would be an unprecedented, highly interesting, and fantastically
useful resource.
But, obviously, this would require a massive collaborative effort. It
seems to me that this is the sort of collaborative project that scholarly
publishers could take on. Now, if you want to use this particular
idea, I want in, because I absolutely love this idea, and eventually I
plan to do it myself. I’ve actually prototyped it.
I hope you have found this useful. I’ve covered a lot of topics very
quickly and roughly. I briefly painted a picture of what scholarly
collaboration might produce by the year 2017. Then I reported on a
series of free online encyclopedia projects, and from them I drew a
series of principles about how to organize a successful collaborative
project. I offered a few business model ideas that a publisher might
use to fund collaborative projects. And, finally, I gave you a couple
of what I think are fairly intriguing ideas about what scholars can do
together.
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Maybe they are just waiting for you to bring them together to
collaborate online.
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