Description
Version-of-record in The Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice
This is the postprint of a paper first published on this page as a preprint (https://www.crimrxiv.com/pub/ujmdet95/release/9)
In this article, I describe and explain a way for criminologists—as individuals, groups and, especially, as university units (e.g., colleges, departments, schools)—to increase the quantity and quality of open criminology. They should ask university librarians to make their outputs open access (OA) on their “unit repositories” (URs), which are unit-dedicated “collections” on universities’ institutional repositories (IR). I try to advance this practice by devising and employing a metric, the “URscore,” to document, analyze, and rank criminology units’ contributions to open criminology, as prescribed. To illustrate the metric’s use, I did a study of 45 PhD-granting criminology units in the United States. I found almost all of them have access to an IR; less than two-thirds have a UR; less than one-third have used it this decade; their URs have a total of 190 open outputs from the 2020s, with 78% emanating from the top-three “most open” PhD-granting criminology units in the US: University of California, Irvine (with 72 open outputs), John Jay College of Criminal Justice (with 47 such outputs), and University of Nebraska, Omaha (with 30 such outputs). I end with a discussion of critical issues, instructions, and futures, including what I learned from publishing this article’s preprint (Jacques, 2022).
The default in criminology is to be “closed.” Think of paywalled papers and books; locked-up data and code; unshared teaching materials. Our scholarly communication is muddled. The status quo made sense in 1950 because of technological limitations. The computer and internet made information free like never before. Criminology is changing from closed to open.
“Open criminology” refers to the reasons, processes, and results of making criminological outputs “open access” (OA): “digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions” (Suber, n.d.). Examples of open outputs are “gold” and “diamond” articles, chapters, and books; final reports on the websites of centers and funders; preprints, postprints, reviews, datasets, and code libraries on repositories; and, open educational resources, from syllabi to lecture notes and question banks.
Open outputs are a small subset of all criminology outputs. The vast majority of them are inaccessible (Ashby, 2020). Closed outputs create a privileged class of people who have access—through purchase (e.g., as with articles) or request (e.g., as often happens with data, code, and teaching materials)—and use this to their advantage. Criminology’s “one-percenters” don’t mean to harm others, but they unfairly benefit from the status quo.
Closed science is antiutilitarian. Humanity and science are held back by closed outputs, promoted by open ones. It is logical and karmic that open outputs are more impactful, as measured by citation and altmetrics, because they constitute a more inclusive and diverse science (Hitchcock, 2004); not only in stakeholder demographics, but in the resultant opportunity to do and spread scholarship (e.g., adapt articles into open educational resources, try to replicate findings with open data and code).
The current dominance of closed criminology is not out of necessity. Criminologists have everything they need to make their outputs open, right now, for free. There is a literature on OA that shows why it’s useful (impact, social justice) and how to participate (e.g., deposit preprints, prepare data for public consumption) (see CrimRxiv, n.d., a, b).
Criminologists should not be considering whether to participate in OA. The question is, How best to participate? As with reducing crime and improving criminal justice, there are different strategies for increasing the quantity and quality of open criminology.
In this article, I outline what I believe to be the theoretically best way for criminologists to achieve this mission. In the next section, I describe my proposed strategy’s basis: legal (copyright and licenses), administrative (librarianship), and organizational (unit- and institutional repositories). On that basis, I created a process for doing open criminology that, in theory, has the highest utility of the options.
In the next section, I present information and ideas on why my proposed process is “best”: with more utility—benefit relative to cost—than alternatives. Not perfect, but better. Not necessarily best for any given individual, but best for the modal criminologist and, by extension, best for the population and its stakeholders.
After, I try to increase interest in, and implementation of, my proposed process by showing what it looks like and how to measure success. Specifically, I walk readers through why and how I devised and employed a metric, the “URscore,” to document, analyze, and rank criminology units’ contributions to open criminology, as prescribed.
To illustrate the metric’s use, I share my study of 45 PhD-granting criminology units in the United States (US). Findings are not representative of criminology units in the US or those outside the US, with and without PhD programs. The study’s purpose is, again, to illustrate what open criminology looks like as data, how to research it, and how to motivate it.
Compared to other criminology-rich nations, US institutions and individuals lag behind in OA. In the US, there is a lack of federal or state mandate that requires authors or institutions to provide OA, with the exception of some grant-funded work. There is a lack of criminologists who are informed about OA and contribute to it. Those who do contribute, as explained below, often use suboptimal publishing practices, even illegal ones.
In a situation like this, it is best for institutions and individuals to ask for help. I often say libraries and librarians are the most underused resources available to criminologists. To maximize the impact and social justice of our outputs, we must do more than great science; we need assistance in making those outputs maximally discoverable and accessible.
Finally, the article presents critical issues, instructions, and futures. From sharing this article’s preprint (Jacques, 2022) and discussing it openly with criminologists, I learned an important lesson. I share it with you as an example of how OA advances criminology faster and better than closed scholarly communication.
This section covers copyright and license, librarianship and repositories, because they are key to maximizing the positive effects of publication. In Wheeler’s (2022) short review of this article’s preprint (Jacques, 2022), he suggests removing this section because “I am guessing most academics don’t think about copyright at all, since there is never intention of monetizing the work. It is more an inconsequential bureaucratic thing to publishing.”
I agree with Wheeler’s observation that criminologists do not care about copyright. I disagree, however, the implication is to reduce my discussion of it.1 To maximize the positive effects of your publications, you need to use the best combination of copyright and librarianship, which involve license, librarians, and repositories. Impact is about more than the quality of your papers, data, code, or educational resources. It also reflects the discoverability and accessibility of those work products.
Criminology should not be closed at this point in history. For years now, it has been possible for every new journal article to be made OA, one way or another (e.g., green, gold, diamond), sooner or later (i.e., depending on embargo). Criminology is closed, in part, because criminologists do not understand copyright and, therefore, see little to no need for OA.
Many criminologists think, for instance, it is legal to publicly share their paywalled versions-of-record (VORs) on their personal websites, ResearchGate, and Academia. In this perceived reality, green OA is unnecessary. Their ignorance of copyright bounds their rationality. They wind up committing a crime instead of providing legal OA to their preprints or postprints.
It is arguably better, from a utilitarian perspective, for authors to provide illegal access than no access to scholarly publications. Yet, it is clearly better to provide legal OA because this is more sustainable than criminalization. Once authors understand copyright, they come to see the need for OA.
To be clear, “open” is more than “free of financial cost.” All open outputs are free but not vice versa. Open outputs are free forever, not a limited time, due to a license. What a license does is grant an actor (person or group) a right to distribute or adapt a creative work. The work may be previously unpublished. Broadly defined, to “publish” a creative work is to “make it public.” I refer to published scholarly works as “outputs.”
Every criminological output can be made OA by stamping it with a Creative Commons (CC) license or a like kind (e.g., see opensource.org/licenses). The only person who can give license to an output is the copyright owner or someone acting at their direction (i.e., on their behalf). By default, a work’s creator holds its copyright. Copyright does the opposite of a license: it restricts a creative work’s distribution and adaptation. It does so severely with “all rights reserved.” A license changes this status.
Of any license, criminologists are most familiar with the “publisher agreements” signed pre-publication. Copyright is not actually transferred. Rather, criminologists give publishers a license to distribute their work. What this does is give publishers the right to make the VOR closed access, i.e. paywalled. To make the VOR open, authors or their supporting institutions (e.g., university employer) can pay an “article processing charge” (APC) to make the VOR OA, specifically what is called “gold” OA. APCs are expensive, usually costing thousands of dollars.
There are free ways for authors to make their articles OA. One is to publish in what are called “diamond” journals. They are OA but do not charge an APC. Before a paper becomes a VOR it is “postprint”; before this, a preprint.” A preprint is the version of a paper that has not been accepted for publication in a journal (e.g., the initial submission to a journal). A postprint is the version that has been accepted (e.g., the R&R submission).
Ideally readers can access an article’s VOR. If not, they should have access to its postprint or preprint. This is called “green” OA. It is found on authors’ personal website, field-based repositories (e.g., CrimRxiv), general-repositories (e.g., SocArxiv, Zenodo) and, as suggested below, institutional repositories. Big publishers permit their authors to provide green OA. They place no restriction on publishing preprints, though some limit (i.e., embargo) when and where it is ok to share postprints.
How exactly does a copyright holder give license, or not, to their creative work? Ideally, in the “metadata,” which are data about the output (e.g., creators, abstract) and associated information (e.g., URL, DOI). This term is from LIS, a field that can be used to increase criminology’s impact.
Communities develop with the division of labor. Criminologists are taught to publish frequently and in the so-called “best” places, but not how to make their outputs OA. This is more complicated than uploading a file to a website. On top of license issues (which include embargo problems), open criminology hinges on choosing where (i.e., which website) and how (e.g., with what metadata) to “deposit” the output for proper preservation and dissemination, a decision affected by technical and social factors.
When criminologists are solely involved in open dissemination, one of two things tend to happen: they opt not to share outputs; or, they share outputs with improper licensing (i.e., counter creators’ intention/desire), copyright and contract violation (e.g., release despite embargo; posting of paywalled versions-of-record), and poor metadata (e.g., no DOI or machine-readable abstract). “Avoiding these problems” is equal to “improving the quality of outputs.” Here, I am using “quality” as would experts in LIS: an evaluation of outputs’ dissemination, separate its content.
For criminologists to maximize the LIS quality of their outputs, they should work with their university librarians. Criminology would be better disseminated and generate greater impact. By gaining librarian assistance, criminologists would avoid spending time better spent on criminology; plus, they become blameless for copyright violation by offloading the responsibility.
At most libraries of research-oriented universities, at least, there are staff proficient in OA or willing to quickly become such. Criminologists need to ask for help. Librarians can do most of the work on criminologists’ behalf, asking questions as needed.
A practical implication of working with librarians is outputs will be shared on “institutional repositories” (IRs). They are one of a few places that outputs are made OA. Generally, a “repository” is a public e-library used for preserving (i.e., “backing-up”) and openly disseminating outputs.
An IR is a specific type of repository, namely that operated by and dedicated to a particular university. Another type of repository is discipline- or field-specific. These are referred to as “(a)rxives,” pronounced like “archives,” following from Cornell University’s arXiv for hard science fields. A third option are general-use repositories like Github, Dataverse, OSF Preprints, SSRN, and Zenodo, which can be used by creators in any discipline or field.
Outside repositories, criminologists share their outputs on social networking websites such as Academia and ResearchGate (RG). Use of them is another example of what goes wrong without librarians. Unlike repositories, Academia and RG do not support export, harvesting, or long-term preservation (Fortney & Gonder, 2015).
The same problems apply to most personal websites and those maintained by university units outside the library (e.g., “university.edu/criminology_unit”). It is possible to circumvent the problems by using a publishing website such as PubPub, but this requires criminologists to know more about LIS than acceptable. To repeat, I think they should collaborate with librarians.
When librarians are asked for help making outputs OA, they will use the library’s IR. This is because creators, librarians, and IRs are aligned through their shared source of financial support: the university and its benefactors (e.g., taxpayers, tuition-paying students, philanthropists).
IRs provide librarians with everything needed to preserve outputs, increase their discoverability with proper metadata, adhere to copyright, and provide license for open access. Indeed, we should use librarians for the very reason they have good repositories at their disposal.
Some IRs have collections dedicated to specific university units, such as departments, colleges, and centers. Think of these collections as “mini-IRs”: public e-libraries used to preserve and disseminate outputs from particular units. I refer to these as “URs,” short for “unit repositories.”
Characteristically, the top of URs display the unit’s name and, sometimes, a description of the unit (e.g., “About”). To be clear, URs are different from collections meant to display search results for “criminology” and whatnot, or reflect classification in a disciplinary taxonomy (e.g., “criminology” as a niche of “sociology” on SocArXiv). Rather, the purpose of URs is to represent social groups—particular units in universities.
Like neighborhoods, people visit URs to browse them: to see what is there, hoping to find something of interest that can be put to use (i.e., make impact). Visitors look for research specific to their geography; to see what their colleagues are producing; prepare for job opportunities; choose between graduate programs; scrutinize tax expenditures; rank schools in open criminology (see next section); and so on.
Potentially, a UR is a one-stop shop for browsing and accessing every output of every member in a given unit. If the neighborhood has more traffic, this means its members are doing better. They are being viewed more often (pageviews), by more people (unique users), which lead to more and better inclusion in journalism, laws and policies, syllabi, for instance. To get more traffic, criminology units should populate their URs.
Above, I hope to convince criminologists to (1) make their outputs OA, (2) ask university librarians for help, and (3) appreciate the utility of outputs being deposited in IRs and URs. For most criminologists, and compared to the alternatives, my prescription will be the most rational approach to providing open outputs: it will cost them less, but their outputs will be higher quality (in the LIS sense) and thus generate more impact.
Naturally, I want criminologists to act on my suggestions: for individuals to openly share their outputs via librarians in URs; and, for units to make sure they have URs, and incentivize or require creators to use them. I came to ask myself, “To what extent do criminology units have URs? Where they exist, are they used? How can I increase URs’ prevalence and usage to increase the quantity and quality of open criminology?”
To answer these questions, I devised a simple metric that may be used to assess, compare, and rank criminology units. A unit’s “URscore” is equal to the number of open outputs on its UR in a given period.2 The URscore is a direct and partial measure of each unit’s contributions to open criminology. Also, it is a proxy of each unit’s productivity, scholarly justice (a type of social justice), and impact. This is because until outputs are created, they cannot be made OA; until outputs are made OA, they cannot be used by everyone; until outputs are usable by everyone, they cannot have maximum impact.
The greater a school’s provision of open outputs on its UR, the more it can pride itself on being productive, just, and potentially impactful. Of course, the URscore is only one way to analyze open criminology. Additional metrics could focus on individuals or different groups (e.g., societies/associations or journals and publishers). Whatever the metric is, it can be used to assess, compare, and rank actors.
Rankings are not always useful or appropriate. It depends on the purpose and method. Like it or not, people—criminologists, administrators, students, and others—pay attention to rankings and are persuaded by them. Hence, rankings can be created and used to motivate action. My ranking is meant to reward units who are leaders in open criminology and to encourage all units to provide greater access using their URs.
Criminology and OA are of global importance. Ideally, then, so too would be my ranking of criminology units. This is the goal, but I start small to be pragmatic. Herein, I work through application of the metric, and then the ranking, by focusing on criminology units with PhD programs in the US. My population list is based on members in the Association of Doctoral Programs in Criminology and Criminal Justice (ADPCCJ, n.d).3
There are 45 US criminology units on the ADPCCJ’s members list. For each, I used the Google search-engine to locate its university’s IR. I find all but one criminology unit (98%) has an IR. Next, I browsed each IR to locate each unit’s UR. Twenty-eight units (62%) have a UR. Finally, for each UR, I counted the number of open outputs published in 2020, 2021, or 2022 (up to August 11).
I find the sum of open outputs is 190, with an average of 4.22 per unit; a median and mode of zero; and a standard deviation of 13.39. However, only 13 units shared an open output. Among them, they did so on average 14.6 times, with a median of 4 and mode of 1; the range is 1 to 72. My data and codebook are embedded in this article’s preprint (Jacques, 2022). Table 1 has key counts and statistics.
Table 1. The availability and use of URs for/by PhD-granting criminology units in the US
University of criminology unit | UR on IR | UR has open outputs from 2020-22 | Counts of UR open outputs | |||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
2020 | 2021 | 2022 | ’20-2 | |||
American University | ||||||
Arizona State University | ||||||
California University of Pennsylvania | ||||||
Florida International University | ✅ | |||||
Florida State University | ✅ | |||||
Georgia State University | ✅ | ✅ | 4 | 7 | 6 | 17 |
George Mason University | ||||||
Indiana University | ✅ | |||||
Indiana University of Pennsylvania | ||||||
John Jay College of Criminal Justice | ✅ | ✅ | 23 | 17 | 7 | 47 |
Michigan State University | ||||||
North Dakota State University | ||||||
Northeastern University | ✅ | ✅ | 1 | 1 | ||
Old Dominion University | ✅ | ✅ | 4 | 1 | 1 | 6 |
Pennsylvania State University | ||||||
Prairie View A&M University | ✅ | |||||
Rutgers University, Newark | ✅ | ✅ | 3 | 2 | 2 | 7 |
Sam Houston State University | ✅ | |||||
Southern Illinois University | ✅ | |||||
Tarleton State University | ||||||
Temple University | ||||||
Texas Southern University | ✅ | |||||
Texas State University | ✅ | ✅ | 1 | 1 | ||
University at Albany, SUNY | ✅ | ✅ | 1 | 1 | ||
University of Arkansas, Little Rock | ✅ | |||||
University of California, Irvine | ✅ | ✅ | 24 | 26 | 22 | 72 |
University of Central Florida | ✅ | |||||
University of Cincinnati | ||||||
University of Delaware | ✅ | ✅ | 1 | 1 | ||
University of Florida | ||||||
University of Louisville | ✅ | |||||
University of Maryland | ✅ | |||||
University of Massachusetts-Lowell | ✅ | |||||
University of Miami | ||||||
University of Mississippi | ✅ | ✅ | 4 | 4 | ||
University of Missouri, St. Louis | ✅ | ✅ | 1 | 1 | ||
University of Nebraska, Omaha | ✅ | ✅ | 11 | 15 | 4 | 30 |
University of Nevada, Las Vegas | ✅ | ✅ | 2 | 2 | ||
University of New Haven | ✅ | |||||
University of Pennsylvania | ✅ | |||||
University of South Carolina | ✅ | |||||
University of South Florida | ||||||
University of Texas-Dallas | ||||||
University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee | ||||||
Washington State University | ||||||
Sum (%) | 28 (62%) | 13 (29%) | 78 | 68 | 44 | 190 |
Average | 1.73 | 1.51 | 0.97 | 4.22 |
Note: 2022 is through August 11, 2022. Data are correct as of that date. An empty cell means the trait is “absent/zero.”
My data are the empirical basis for a ranking of “the most open PhD-granting criminology units in the US”4; see table 2. The supermajority of criminology units did not share an open output on its UR in the specified timeframe. They have a URscore of zero. These units are “unranked” or “tied for last place.” I avoid labelling them as “tenth place” because it sounds better than it is. Five criminology units have a URscore of 1, making them tied for ninth place. Two or more outputs were deposited by eight criminology units (18%). Half of them (9%) have double-digit URscores.
I find the best place for open criminology is the University of California, Irvine, followed by the John Jay college of Criminal Justice, and, in third place, the University of Nebraska, Omaha. To any criminology unit that earned a rank, congratulations and thank you. For every criminology unit, there is a lot of room for improvement.
Table 2. The most open PhD-granting criminology units in the US, 2020 through August 11, 2022
Rank | University of criminology unit | URscore |
---|---|---|
1 | University of California, Irvine | 72 |
2 | John Jay College of Criminal Justice | 47 |
3 | University of Nebraska, Omaha | 30 |
4 | Georgia State University | 17 |
5 | Rutgers University, Newark | 7 |
6 | Old Dominion University | 6 |
7 | University of Mississippi | 4 |
8 | University of Nevada, Las Vegas | 2 |
9 | Northeastern University | 1 |
- | Texas State University | 1 |
- | University at Albany, SUNY | 1 |
- | University of Delaware | 1 |
- | University of Missouri, St. Louis | 1 |
Unranked | American University | 0 |
- | Arizona State University | 0 |
- | California University of Pennsylvania | 0 |
- | Florida International University | 0 |
- | Florida State University | 0 |
- | George Mason University | 0 |
- | Indiana University | 0 |
- | Indiana University of Pennsylvania | 0 |
- | Michigan State University | 0 |
- | North Dakota State University | 0 |
- | Pennsylvania State University | 0 |
- | Prairie View A&M University | 0 |
- | Sam Houston State University | 0 |
- | Southern Illinois University | 0 |
- | Tarleton State University | 0 |
- | Temple University | 0 |
- | Texas Southern University | 0 |
- | University of Arkansas, Little Rock | 0 |
- | University of Central Florida | 0 |
- | University of Cincinnati | 0 |
- | University of Florida | 0 |
- | University of Louisville | 0 |
- | University of Maryland | 0 |
- | University of Massachusetts-Lowell | 0 |
- | University of Miami | 0 |
- | University of New Haven | 0 |
- | University of Pennsylvania | 0 |
- | University of South Carolina | 0 |
- | University of South Florida | 0 |
- | University of Texas-Dallas | 0 |
- | University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee | 0 |
- | Washington State University | 0 |
Note: “URscore” is equal to the number of open outputs on the criminology unit’s UR with publication date of 2020, 2021, and 2022 (as of August 11). “Unranked” may also be labelled “tied for last place” (tenth).
In time, all criminology units will practice and teach open criminology: the motives, methods, and consequences of making criminological outputs free to reshare and reuse. This is utilitarian: it promotes the greatest good by removing a cost barrier to information and knowledge. Compared to closed outputs, open outputs enjoy a bigger impact. Unlike closed outputs, open ones are social justice.
Open criminology is the future. But when? The supermajority of criminology articles and books are paywalled or with “closed access” (Ashby, 2020). Data, code, and instructor-made teaching resources are usually unpublished, essentially unobtainable. Criminologists—again, as individuals or groups—can transform their field from closed to open. Everything is in place to make every output OA.
My prescription is the most rational way to increase the quantity and quality of open criminology, in theory (but see the Conclusion). To advance this view, I devised and used a metric—the “URscore”—to document, analyze, and rank criminology units’ contributions to open criminology, as prescribed. To illustrate the metric’s use, I did a study of 45 PhD-granting criminology units in the United States (US).
My findings speak to each criminology unit’s scholarly productivity, scholarly justice, and potential impact. I hope criminology units will see their ranking as a reward and/or opportunity for measurable improvement, and use this perception to grow their contributions to open criminology. To conclude, I address potential criticisms, provide “instructions” to my prescription, and consider futures of open criminology.
The URscore is simple, arguably too simple. My metric directly taps into a single aspect of open criminology: the number of open outputs on a criminology unit’s UR in a specified time period. There are other ways and places for criminologists, as individuals or groups, to make outputs OA. It is important to measure these processes and outcomes so they can be prevented (if wrong), improved (if right, but suboptimal execution), and promoted.
This article focuses on the URscore because it represents my prescription’s outcome. My proposed process is best (but see the Conclusion) because it minimizes criminologists’ workload and risk, yet ensures outputs are made high quality (e.g., good metadata, proper licensing) from a LIS perspective, which makes the outputs more discoverable, accessible, and useable (i.e., increases their impact). Most criminologists should stay focused on doing criminology; leave librarianship to librarians; collaborate to widely disseminate the fruits of criminology.
Potentially, it is easy and fast for criminology units to increase their URscore, and, thus, the rankings can quickly change. Sudden or big change could be called “manipulation,” colloquially referred to as “gaming the system.” In a month’s time, for example, a criminology unit could move from unranked to number one. To me, this is unproblematic. I would be happy to see it happen.
My goal is to increase the quantity and quality of open criminology. If a criminology unit goes up the ranking, this means there are more open outputs of high quality. My pursuit of this outcome is why, recall, I created the URscore, did a study, and made a ranking. I will consider myself successful—to have made an impact—to the extent that criminology units act on my prescription.
With or without me, criminology’s default will change from closed to open. Much of the change will be due to funder-, government-, and university-level incentives, mandates, and protections. These already exist, to be clear, but more are on the way. Whatever the motives may be for a criminology unit and its members to be more open, the outcome is measurable with the URscore.
My data collection, analysis, and ranking is restricted to PhD-granting criminology units in the US. Some readers will be disappointed with this scope. I am too. A lot of criminology units are left out. Obviously, there are important criminology units without a PhD program (e.g., centers) and/or located outside the US. Ideally, a study like mine would include every criminology unit. This may sound practically impossible, but advances in automation make it doable.
If we can generate a list of criminology units, we can locate their URs; with a list of URs, we can regularly crawl and scrape them; with those data, we can create a program that contemporaneously updates associated rankings. This automated process would provide criminology units and their stakeholders with a baseline and other comparison points for progress.
Automation would also help researchers and advocates identity and advance best practices in open criminology. For example, criminologists of British universities are required to deposit their postprints in their IRs, so it would be useful to see how their URscores compare to those of US criminology units. Criminologists everywhere should expect more and stronger OA policies. The variation across countries, criminology units, and other actors presents an evidence-based opportunity to discard and fine-tune strategies for increasing open criminology.
You are reading the preprint of my paper, which I have not published (again, “made public”) on my criminology unit’s UR. I debated whether to publish the preprint there or here on CrimRxiv, criminology’s field-specific repository. As you can see, I chose the latter, which goes against my own prescription. Why? I did it to illustrate that my prescription is for the “average” or “typical” criminologist, not all of them.
For the typical criminologist, my prescription is best because it reduces the negative effects of their LIS-related ignorance and misinformation. This is not a criticism, as criminologists are not experts in LIS. They should be aware of their shortcomings and find solutions to them. For them, my prescription is best because it reduces their role in dissemination and increases that of actual LIS experts, librarians.
However, there are criminologists who are proficient in LIS. Because they know more, they have more good options. For them, what is “best” will depend on their motives and use-cases. I decided it is best to publish this preprint on CrimRxiv than my UR (or elsewhere) because it does more to promote open criminology. It enables me to embed my open data within this preprint, and lets readers clearly connect their open reviews to it. These are potentially important considerations for every criminologist, but they are too much to properly evaluate without some expertise in LIS.
My prescription is for criminologists to get their outputs put into their URs, with the help of librarians. For readers interested in taking my advice, I close with “back-of-the-bottle” instructions. To continue with the rational choice motif, let us think of those instructions as part of a “script,” which lends itself to script analysis (i.e., that meant to identify intervention points for improvement). Scripts have a series of decision-points and related actions. When a creator finishes a creative work, specifically, they:
decide whether to make the output OA; if yes,
decide whether to have a librarian put it on the IR and UR; if yes,
submit the output and request to a librarian; possibly,
receive and answer questions from the librarian.
After, the creator has completed their part in the script. Each step is a potential fail point. In this article, I hope to convince criminologists to answer “yes” at steps 1 and 2 so that steps 3 and 4 happen.
However, and as relates to step 2, one problem is that not all criminology units have a UR. To my knowledge, every IR platform/website can be made to host a UR. Therefore, if a criminology unit finds itself without one, its representative (e.g., a faculty member, staff) should request the library to make it. If the proper contact person/channel is unclear, it is ok to email the Dean or their Associate, explaining the unit wants help and asking for directions.
The library should be able to set up (i.e., make the collections) and maintain (i.e., make deposits on) the UR, but they cannot grow it alone. They need creators to submit their outputs for OA publication, which brings us to the fail point of step 3: a criminologist who wants to share their outputs openly, but does not know which librarian to ask for help or what exactly to request.
I think the best “intervention” is for the library and/or criminology unit to create a web-based submission form. It should tell criminologists what information to add (e.g., title, abstract) and, upon submission, automatically send it to the appropriate librarian. The submission-form solution kills two birds with one stone: submitters can be ignorant of who to ask for help and what to tell them, so long as they know of the form and where to find it.
When will open criminology catch on? I do not know. There are a lot of scenarios that could play out, with faster or slower results, bigger or smaller effects. There is not a future but futures. Which will it be?
To understand my guess, readers should know that I think criminologists act irrationally with respect to OA. Most of them, it seems, recognize the utility but keep their creative works closed, either unpublished or without OA. Perhaps this is because their perceptions of utility are culturally bound: shaped by their beliefs, attitudes, values, and “tool kits” or “know-how.”
The evidence suggests criminologists’ culture is closed, with a mix of indifference and hostility toward OA. This culture is a symptom of their anomie. Peer-reviewed journal articles and books have become the end, when they should be the means. There is increasing pressure on criminologists to publish more. Eventually, they will reach their maximum ability to publish more and better papers and books. Except wait, there’s more.
My guess is criminology will become open for the wrong reasons: as a byproduct of their anomic focus on publishing as the end goal. Criminologists will do the right thing, not for the sake of scholarly justice, or even so much to increase their impact, but because they want to be hired, promoted, tenured, paid more, and otherwise personally benefit.
Fact is, those outcomes have a closer one-to-one relationship with productivity—especially as measured by publications—than impact or scholarly justice. So for open criminology to develop, criminologists will need to perceive its positive effect on their publication counts. This is good news for open criminology because it inherently involves publishing. To make a creative work OA, it must be published.
In a field where publishing has become the end, strategies to increase publishing are valued and employed. Eventually, criminologists will realize that they should participate in OA to improve their employment outcomes. They will see OA as a way to get more publications without much more work. Consider the chain-of-events that could result from growing requirements to share data and code, for example:
To fulfill the obligations, criminologists get librarians to deposit those materials on their URs; thus,
those materials, previously treated as unpublished (i.e., closed) “inputs,” become published open outputs;
because they are now published, they are added to curriculum vitas; thus,
criminologists look more productive, benefiting as a result.
Some criminologists will figure this out sooner than their peers. They will expand from openly publishing data and code to publishing more of everything (e.g., reviews, educational resources, training materials, recorded presentations). Their CVs will get longer. Their employment outcomes will improve. All of this is legitimate.
Likewise, some criminology units will embrace the transformation because they recognize how it can be used to appear more productive, both internally (e.g., to Provosts and Presidents) and externally (e.g., to legislators and philanthropists), without requiring much more work from unit members. In time, these “early-movers”—as individuals and units—will speed ahead of their competitors, publishing much more than them. They will climb rankings like that of US News & World Report; attract the best students and job candidates; be given more resources by their superiors; generally, things will get better for them.
Later, and only too late for some, other criminologists will realize they fell behind because their creative works are still closed. They will feel newfound pressure to catch up and keep up. “Publish or Perish” will expand in scope, no longer limited to papers and books. Open criminology will change from something that “should be done to get ahead” to “needs to be done to keep up.”
When this happens, open criminology will have done more than catch on. It will be irrevocably part of the field. Criminologists will be afraid to go without it, just as they are now afraid to do it. This end result is attributable to self-centeredness, but in the case of open criminology, the effect will be altruistic. In the end, our stakeholders will have more information and knowledge to freely reuse and reshare.
A benefit of working on open criminology is I am often and quickly proven wrong. What distinguishes scientific ideas as “scientific” is they can be falsified. The key to doing science is not proving yourself right. Anyone can do that. Scientific improvement requires being wrong. Being wrong helps you identity and fix problems. Ideas evolve by adapting. When ideas are shown wrong, this is an opportunity to adapt and improve.
After publishing this article’s preprint (Jacques, 2022), I received public and private feedback that convinced me the proposed process is too prescriptive and too reliant on university libraries and librarians. I looked at my findings and personal experience, then the feedback, and begrudgingly accepted: the process would not survive the US criminology environment, even with the motivational ranking. I am working to fix these problems; doing “surgery.”
Without operation, there is one way to prevent the process’s death: lawmakers or university administrators could mandate (i.e., require) participation by authors. Their fear of punishment would keep the process alive. This is already happens in other countries. Do I think this is a good idea? Yes. Criminologists are hurting their impact; committing social injustice. If fear is needed to compel good behavior, so be it.
Preferably, criminologists will voluntarily get committed to OA. I do not expect this to happen. Eventually, we will be scared into participation, as imagined in the Futures scenario or as a consequence of mandate. A fear-based criminology is what we live. Criminology is closed because of fear. Open criminology will proliferate when we learn to fear not doing it.
The alternative to fear is hope. I look forward to an open criminology that flourishes, with all kinds of outputs freely shared and adapted. Unlike closed criminology, open criminology will be science. What is our best hope of making this happen sooner than later, bigger than smaller? The work must be done for us or we must be paid extra to do it.
Ashby, Matthew P J. 2020. The Open-Access Availability of Criminological Research to Practitioners and Policy Makers. Journal of Criminal Justice Education 32. https://doi.org/10.1080/10511253.2020.1838588
Association of Doctoral Programs in Criminology and Criminal Justice (ADPCCJ). No date. Member Institutions. Retrieved from https://adpccj.com/members
CrimRxiv. No date, a. How to CrimRxiv. CrimRxiv. Retrieved from https://www.crimrxiv.com/how-to
CrimRxiv. No date, b. Pleas to open criminology. CrimRxiv. Retrieved from https://www.crimrxiv.com/pleas
Fortney, Katie, and Justin Gonder. 2015. A social networking site is not an open access repository. Office of Scholarly Communication, University of California. Retrieved from https://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/2015/12/a-social-networking-site-is-not-an-open-access-repository/
Hitchcock, Steve 2004. The effect of open access and downloads ('hits') on citation impact: a bibliography of studies. Last updated June 25, 2013. OpCit Projec Retrieved from https://web-archive.southampton.ac.uk/opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html
Jacques, Scott. 2022. Ranking the openness of criminology units: An attempt to incentivize the use of librarians, institutional repositories, and unit-dedicated subpages to increase scholarly impact and justice. CrimRxiv. Retrieved from https://www.crimrxiv.com/pub/ujmdet95/release/9
Suber, Peter. No date. Open access (the book). Retrieved from https://cyber.harvard.edu/hoap/Open_Access_(the_book)
Wheeler, Andrew. 2022. Review of “Ranking the openness of criminology units.” CrimRxiv. https://doi.org/10.21428/cb6ab371.f514a7ba