Dear Roger, Armin,

This is a really interesting discussion. Mute magazine's position is 
that we make our entire archive of articles freely available online, but 
sell a selection of these in our quarterly print magazine - which is, 
like Leonardo's journal, an important way of giving intellectual 
credibility and attention to certain articles. But again, someone is 
paying the price for all this - i.e. the taxpayer, through our Arts 
Council grant, as well as other investors into Mute, and to a lesser 
extent the subscribers. You'd think this is a schizophrenic model, where 
the freeness of the archive detracts from the print issues 
attractiveness to some degree. The funny thing is that our subscriptions 
have only fractionally reduced since we started to offer the same 
articles free online. People like the print for different reasons - not 
least its design, and it is really quite indispensable as a tool with 
which to sharpen the focus on certain issues, circulate the content to 
'hard to reach' groups, and so on. So I agree with you Roger that the 
hybrid model does seem workable. Maybe it's really unfashionable to say 
in these circles, but the quality control enacted by 'gate-keepers' such 
as magazine editors, does still have an important role to play in these 
citizen_journalist, poly-media-form times. There are still huge problems 
with this model - not least the class power that infests almost all 
bastions of knowledge production, but I think there is still some 
purpose to edited content. However this will always involve people's 
labour time, which must be paid for either with a salary or levels of 
self-sacrifice which the reputation-economy can only partly remunerate. 
I agree that visibility is the thing that is sacrificed in the 
multi-channel media landscape. Portals, magazines, etc. help counteract 
this - and of course, these don't have to be commercial, professional or 
publicly funded, it's just much harder to sustain them if they're not.

Some more flagrant self-promotion. We've just published a review, 
co-written by Anthony Iles and myself, of the recent AV: Broadcast 
festival, at the end of which we consider some of the same questions:

See, 'Citizen's Banned?': http://www.metamute.org/en/Citizens-Banned




roger malina wrote:
> Danny, Armin
> 
> Yes Leonardo journals are under the MIT Press system ( I wish they
> were a multinational, might solve our budget deficit  and allow us to
> pay authors and reviewers !!) and authors retain rights to their own texts
> with some lexibility as long as we can archive the texts and disseminate
> them in the systems that MIT Press has set up.
> 
> We have managed with MIT press to make sure that all 40 years
> and 6000 articles of leonardo are now available on line= but this
> access is tied to institutions and individuals that have subscriptions
> ( for individuals a subscription is the cost of two good bottles of wine
> a year). Most authors also put their articles openly available on their
> own web sites.
> 
> We havent figured out how to migrate to a sustainable model
> that is not subscription based. Ironically the thing we do now that
> sells the best is books !!!!
> 
> One experiment we are trying is Leonardo Transactions= Editor in
> Chief Ernest Edmonds. Leonardo Transactions will soon have an
> "open " pre print server when all texts submitted to Leonardo Transactions
> are immediately available for free on the pre print server. The model
> here is what happens in my field of astronomy where all researchers
> deposit their texts into the astro-ph open system while their texts
> go through review into the archival journals.
> 
> For what its worth nothing is for free on the internet. Someone is paying
> for the internet infrastructure and operating costs, and the time of people
> to keep the system up and running. The model transfers these costs in
> different ways to different users than in the old subscription publication
> models, and tax monies are involved in funding a lot of r and d. ( I work
> in a french government lab and the french tax payer is paying to keep
> the system running; private individuals pay individually for keeping a
> system
> going in their home )
> 
> We clearly are evolving to a different system where indeed every author
> should have all their texts on their own web site or deposited anywhere
> they can without direct cost to themselves. The problem then for the author
> is how to get people to read their texts, and get people to pay attention
> to what they are doing. Clearly the interesting work is rarely appearing
> in the top 10,000 clips on u tube !! New kinds of tools for this are
> proliferating
> ( one forgets that it took decades if not centuries after the invention of
> print
> for the systems of books, journal and associated IP to develop; it will
> presumably take decades after the invention of the internet before semi
> stable formats and functional IP systems are developed to be consistent with
> the new situation; The index at the back of a book took for ever to be
> invented)
> 
> What a system like Leonardo does at the moment is help bring attention to
> the
> work of people who choose to publish in our books our journals or web sites.
> ( over 100,000 article downloads a year). So the authors who give some kind
> of rights to Leonardo/MIT Press as part of the current business model ensure
> that their texts are archived indefinitely in the scholarly on line
> archives,
> that their texts get some attention from an intellectual community
> internationally
> to the extent the Leonardo system attracts readers focused on the
> art/science/technology
> interface.
> 
> I guess the open/closed discussion always reminds me that none of the
> approaches
> we are discussing are in extreme situations and we are in a hybrid system
> that is evolving
> .
> 
> roger
> 
> Hi
> 
> Just a note to say that I had an article published in Leonardo where they
> were prepared to accept a non-exclusive license agreement to publish, rather
> than transfer of copyright. My experience is that many journals owned by the
> multinationals will do this if you agitate hard enough for it. The article
> also appears for free on my website, and has been republished in a book.
> 
> Of course, access to knowledge is a critical issue, but I think there are a
> lot of different types of publishing economies out there, and many of us
> participate in them in different ways at different times. The "old"
> copyright regime still drives the publishing industry and will for a while
> yet...
> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Danny
> 
> 
> On 29/04/2008, at 7:28 PM, Armin Medosch wrote:
> 
> Hi list
> 
> the problem is, I can never submit a paper to anything done by Leonardo
> because they adhere to the old copyright regime. I have made a decision,
> that everything i write is published freely and should be available on
> the internet without charge. now has this anything to do with FOSS?
> 
> regards
> Armin