Future Trends and Open Access: Good for the church, too.

As a Christian engaging the wider culture, I see part of my responsibility as that of reading and listening widely to voices outside the church, with a particular eye on noticing what trends are acting as cultural engines that will shape the next few decades. The church has not typically done a good job of this, and most churches are woefully behind the times. There are a few shining exceptions, and I’m pleased to be in touch with some of them.

My recent reading and listening have included several seminal thinkers and communicators whose ideas (or the movements they represent) I think will have an impact on the future direction of culture. Among these are:

Eben Moglen and Larry Lessig. Professor Moglen is the primary author of the Gnu Public License v3.0, which is the license that protects a lot of Free and Open Source Software and makes sure that it remains free. Professor Lessig is the founder of the Free Culture Movement (link http://www.freeculture.org) and also the author behind the Creative Commons licenses (link: http://www.creativecommons.org). These two professors spoke together last year and discussed document licenses and the future of free culture, a talk available online at the Internet Archive Web Site here: http://www.archive.org/details/wikimania_2006_moglen_and_lessig

This talk is important because it speaks to making documents (information, novels, etc.) available for free, and even speaks to on-demand printing of documents that have passed into the public domain. Making information available for free is a good thing, and the most innovative and influential churches and ecclesial organizations have already begun making things like sermons and sermon outlines available online for free download. There are still some organizations and churches that want to charge exhorbitant prices to get a CD of audio talks (like those of speeches given at denominational General Assemblies, for instance.) And there are organizations that are simply out of touch culturally and technologically who sell cassette tapes for $5.00 or $10.00 by mail. How many tapes are these folks selling nowadays anyway, and who is buying? I will conjecture that over 90% of cassettes purchased from churches and church conferences in the last decade have been purchased by people over the age of 70.

Hey, fellow Christians, if I may bring something to your notice, your problem is not creating revenue with your sermons, nor is your problem the potential for someone stealing your sermon content and using it without your permission. Your problem is obscurity. If you allow people to read and listen to your ideas for free, you just might actually benefit the kingdom of God. At the same time you increase your own audience, and your potential impact. Who knows — if you are actually good at what you do, someone might hear you speak and think that you have something important to say, or that the way you are saying things resonates with people better than the same message packaged differently has done so in the past. This could even result in an invitation to speak at a conference or colloquium, or to write an article for publication.

A shining example of this ethic is the Acts 29 Network, which has made the audio from its church planting bootcamps and regional events available for free on the Internet for the last several years. I’ve learned a tremendous amount from Acts 29 speakers, and in the past year they’ve also added PDF copies of the bootcamp manuals to the audio files. This is kingdom thinking. Acts 29 has also started a clearinghouse for Missional church planting articles and audio at The Resurgence. If only every church planting network would do the same.

Back to professors Moglen and Lessig for a moment – their talk linked above is important because it points to a new means of production for literary content (and audio content) that is making increasing impact on the culture. I think the talk is worthwhile. In it, Lessig and Moglen make several references (especially during the question and answer session) to someone named Yochai, who seems to have greatly influenced both speakers. A bit of searching and I found out that Larry Lessig said that Yochai Benkler (http://www.benkler.org) wrote _The Wealth of Networks_, a book which professor Lessig says is the most important book of the twenty-first century thus far. Benkler’s book is downloadable in several formats from his website, linked above, and for those who like audio books, it’s also freely downloadable here: http://www.archive.org/details/wealthofnetworks .

When I read Yochai Benkler’s book for the first time, I knew that I was reading a book that identified an important trend that would be influential in shaping culture for the next century. I couldn’t put my finger on exactly what about the book was important, but I think that the social networks that Benkler describes will be very important in shaping the dissemination of information in this century in ways that are difficult to predict now.

The affinities that exist between the way the church ought to act in culture and the movements of Free Culture and Open Access to Knowledge are manifold. In this case, I think that the secular shapers of culture are way out in front of the church, but we Christians would do well to at least acquaint ourselves with the ideas of these thinkers. There is nothing in their ideas that threatens our theology. On the contrary, their ideas provide some valuable insights into how we might do a better job of disseminating and promulgating theology and cultural impact of the church.

Finally, for the academics in the crowd, those of us who not only appreciate impacting culture but also advancing our theological expression and depth, I heard a talk by Dr. Gavin Yamey, one of the prime movers behind the creation of the Public Library of Science (PLoS) who has a wonderful overview of the effort to create Open Access to academic publications in the biomedical field and a discussion of the possible affinities in the social sciences and humanities here: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/mediaberkman/category/people/gavin-yamey/ .

The basic idea is this: Currently in say, medical literature, someone who does research receives a grant from a funding organization, does a piece of research, then publishes that research in a journal. The rights to the research then pass to the journal. Now academic journals have always been very expensive, and the price has caused the number of subscriptions to drop. The journals have responded by jacking up the price of subscription, so that access to the articles has a high cost. Yamey cogently talks about the case of a third-world medical professional in Africa who wants to research a particular disease that is in outbreak in his country, infecting children. He can access a 200-word abstract of a journal article on the disease, but to get to the full text costs more money than the annual health care spending per capita in his country. Access to research is limited to the rich.

Enter the Open Access movement. Yamey talks about the establishment of Open Access archives and journals who maintain access to journals and articles for free. And as it turns out, Open Access articles are accessed by more people and cited in more research than commercial access journals, thus the impact of Open Access articles is immediately outstripping the legacy provider.

A small number of theological journals are already openly accessible, but most aren’t. As I do research for my graduate thesis in seminary (which I’m working on as I write this) I find many articles for which an abstract is available but full text must be purchased at prohibitive prices. Why is this? One of my professors has a paper that I want to use, but I can’t get it from him. The publisher now owns the rights to the paper, and I can only get access to it through the publication or through a paid subscription service that has full texts of many (but by no means all or even a majority) of theological publications.

In the ecclesial world, we have the same problem that exists in other realms — the journals have closed access to theological journals and most journals that discuss ecclesial methodologies as well. Unlike the world of science, there are almost no well-funded research grants for work in theology. With the exception of the hucksters who beg constantly for money on The Big Hair Networks, most church leaders have very modest compensation packages, and budgets for research are mostly nonexistent.

What I would like to see is the creation of an Internet Commons of theological articles. This commons would immediately have available metrics that are impossible for traditional journals: the number of downloads would be an instant metric, and cross-indexing of hyperlinked citations would make possible an impact scoring system of articles that more scholars and church leaders are reading, citing and using in their work. This makes it possible to identify leading scholars. Here’s to the creation of a Public Library of Theology (PLoT) using the example of the Public Library of Science, using free, open source software.

This is an idea whose time has come. Traditional print media is enormously expensive. Internet publication is much cheaper. Some educators will say that making article texts freely available online will make it too easy to plagiarize, making things harder for educators who have to grade student works, but the contrary is true: Having access to indexed, cross-referenced works actually makes it trivial to check for plagiarism. It is limited access legacy articles in hard copy that are difficult to check, so this argument is a non-starter.

The bottom line for churches, seminaries, leadership organizations, conferences and colloquia is this: Share your information. Post your audio files and documents on the web. If they’re good, they are needed. If they’re bad, at least posting is very cheap. And you do away with the incremental cost of copying, binding, and shipping.

I really doubt that many people will even read this article, but I hope that the call to open up publications in the ecclesial and theological world is one that resonates with others.