August 2001
PowerPoint Presentation linked here
My
contribution to this roundtable is practical rather than theoretical and takes
its departure from a survey of recent history.
My own involvement in this history has given me a series of vantage
points from which to view that history:
first as a research consultant, then as program officer with the
Association of Research Libraries in
Ancient
History
The study was
compiled in 1989 on contract from the Association of Research Libraries
(ARL): "Of Making Many Books"
it was called, with a quiet bow to the prophet Isaiah, and in it I set out to
explain the "serials crisis" of the time – the experience of librarians
that the costs of providing journal subscriptions to their users were running
far ahead of inflation and of their ability to keep up within typical academic
library budgets.[1]
That study
described the serials crisis from three points of view: from a library view, that is to say, taking
the question as a consumer/marketplace problem (namely, one of high prices);
from a scholars' view, that is to say, taking a view of the overarching
systemic dilemma (fed by the information explosion, competitiveness among
scholars, the culture of academic tenure and promotion, and the expectations of
researchers); and from an economists' view, that is to say, looking at a
situation of natural monopoly characterized by high fixed (or "first
copy") costs and low marginal costs and depending on limited but
relatively inelastic demand. The upshot
of the study was a tripartite set of recommendations.
First, the
report advocated a library action agenda.
Most directly, consumer actions could impact the situation by raising consciousness
of the pricing policies of publishers, by publicizing widely the pricing issue,
and by organizing concerted protest against extreme cases of pricing
increases. More strategically, the
report called for creation of a research agenda to study usage, costs, and the
system as a whole in greater depth.
Finally, it urged libraries to work to strengthen the not-for-profit
sector (focusing support on cost-effective publishers, on government agencies,
on building cooperative collections, and developing consortia).
Neither was
the report silent on emerging new electronic technologies:
The above
statement arose from an assessment of the genuine value added by all the
traditional elements of the scholarly publishing system, including editorial
intervention, peer review, and systematic formalization of the published body
of research.
I was, of
course, much younger then, and very idealistic, and so I concluded the report
by urging that librarians work with the rest of the academic community to
encourage change in the criteria by which research grants and academic tenure
are awarded. Quality, not quantity, of
publications should prevail, the report urged.
I was neither the first nor the last to suggest a modification in
publication criteria, nor the only voice to be ignored by a system that still
depends, in large
measure, on
quantitative criteria.
Actions
Taken and Lessons Learned
1. Librarians can, to some extent, control
their own spaces
The first
lesson we can take from this excursion into late 1980s history is that it was
the recommendations for action within the control of librarians that were acted
on most effectively. Many of the issues
identified in the report (such as those of pricing and access) were then and
remain today of broad concern to the entire research community; of course, they
affect first of all the librarians who are charged make a large array of
scholarly materials available to their user communities. While consciousness about pricing and access
to the scholarly literature has broadened over the last decade, the fact that
there is not more widespread interest in the issues is surprising, perplexing,
and troubling – a phenomenon that might well be in itself the subject of
research study.
But –
librarians certainly did all they could.
Over the last decade, a series of ARL interventions (some of which I was
involved with in the early 1990s) have culminated in the "SPARC"
initiative, which combines advocacy with focused attempts to create new
journals from the not-for-profit sector, some on non-traditional business
models and plans. More broadly, in the
last decade the library point of view has been well and widely publicized. It is fair to say that all librarians have
become believers in the importance of scholarly communications issues (and some
faculty have joined librarians in awareness as well). The library community certainly has engaged
more broadly than ever before with not-for-profit publishers and learned
societies. From the dawn of the history
of e-journals (late 1980s), the ARL was active in fostering the creation of
such journals and raising awareness about them.
In 1991, we published the first ARL
Directory of Electronic Journals and, from 1993, I have been co-moderator
of NewJour, an on-line alerting
service with archive that reports new electronic journals as they come to our
attention.
Where librarians
controlled the spaces – organizing ourselves for resource sharing, organizing
consortia for bargaining over prices and licenses – we as a community have had
considerable success. Where we sought to
build partnerships with administrators, faculty, publishers, and (in
particular) funders, we have found that those groups all have their own
priorities and agenda, on which the issues of serials prices and access to
serials information do not loom as large as we could like.
2. Some strategies did not work and are
unlikely to work
Some
strategies the library community has tried in the last decade years simply have
not worked. Here are some of the forms
of advice that have fallen flat:
· "You should publish less"
Likeliest
answer: "When donkeys fly: my dean and the National Science Foundation
may not read my papers, but they do count them."
· "Give self-publishing a try"
Likeliest
answer: "Publishing is not my
job: I do the research and write up the
results: I want to be able to submit my
work to a robust and reliable publishing system and not have to worry about
managing the publication of my research in the future."
· "Take control of your copyrights
and manage your work"
Likeliest
answer: mostly incomprehension. Though there are individuals who manage to do
this to some extent, the ambiguities of copyright, especially in the shifting
sands of Internet life and the actual and proposed changes of the last year,
seem to make this impractical for most scholarly authors.
· "Are you sure you need this
journal subscription? It’s costly!"
Likeliest
answer: "Yes, I need it." Scholarly and scientific information is
rarely fungible. That is to say, there
is rarely a case when an article in another, cheaper journal will meet the
researcher's needs.
· "Let’s start more, cheaper
journals"
Likeliest
answer: "There are too many
journals already." (This is not, in
fact, a bad answer.)
·
"We’ll marginalize the big for-profit scholarly publishers"
Those
who single-mindedly pursue such a strategy have not so far experienced
success. It might be said to be an
unrealistic ambition.
3. Along the way, the unexpected happens
and requires strategic re-adjustment
The world,
moreover, had more than its share of surprises for everyone in the last dozen
years. One need not be very old at all,
for example, to remember the days when one imagined that the Internet was born
and would remain forever a noncommercial space, where any form of advertising
would be flatly illegal and commercial transactions would unthinkable. But the commercialization of the Internet is
now an axiom of the economy of the twenty-first century and every organization
that had a leading position in the "old economy" is aggressively
pursuing Internet strategies. In our
context, this means that precisely the same journals and journal publishers
(both for-profit and not-for-profit) that were powerful in the paper world,
continue to be very influential in the electronic world. Even more important, some of the influential
information providers have used their economic power and influence with
governments to further strengthen protections on intellectual property in
cyberspace. Though the ultimate goal of
such increased protectionism is most often the support of mass market
intellectual property (such as popular books, film, video, and their
derivatives), the big publishers of electronic information for scholars and
scientists benefit as well. Although
increasing numbers of scientific publishers, both not-for-profit and
for-profit, say publicly that the prevailing legal copyright protection periods
of "life plus 50 years" or "life plus 70 years" make no
sense for scholarly works and that the protection period for such works needs
to be much shorter, the reality is that boundaries between scholarly and
commercial works are large and very blurry.
It is unlikely that we will develop national and global legislation that
can make these kinds of distinctions.
4. The marketplace for scholarly
information can be made to work much more effectively in the electronic
environment than it did in the print world
The best news
to counter protectionist shifts in favor of the information sector has been the
discovery that aggressive negotiation in licensing library resources, and in
particularly through consortial arrangements, can provide libraries with at
least one significant antidote to excessive copyright and database
protections: it turns out that almost
everything, even scholarly journal access, is negotiable these days. Much has been said and written in other
venues about the increasing effectiveness of librarians in large-scale
negotiations with the information sector.
5. Economic fluctuations have large global
repercussions
Of course, all
were surprised by the booming economic times of the last decade. The sense of constraint and constriction that
were felt through the economic turns of the 1980s subsided somewhat, even for
academic libraries. On the other hand,
the relative purchasing power of the wealthy countries further distorted prices
for others and the gap between haves and have-nots has probably increased.
Since the late
1980s, the research economy of higher education has mostly boomed and the
research effort overall has continued to expand. The Internet economy exploded – with it came
the discovery that electronic publication would not miraculously or immediately
reduce costs over those of print publishing – but would in fact prove far more
expensive than predicted. Furthermore,
the costs and implications of long-term archiving for electronic publications
are likely to be considerable and have, as yet, been largely unaddressed.
6. Electronic information resources – an
unstoppable phenomenon
Nothing is
clear than that the all forms of publication, including indexing services,
reference works, full text of all kinds, and traditional print journals in
electronic form became incredibly popular very very quickly. From what could easily be a thousand
datapoints, here are just some samples:
· Usage at JSTOR
participating sites more than doubled between November 1998 and November
1999. Overall, usage of the JSTOR
database is increasing at a rate of roughly three times per year. Part of this growth comes from the addition
of new sites, and of course one must control for that. In any case, total 1998 usage was 5,920,398
accesses with 432,714 articles printed;
1999 usage was 17,311,453 accesses and 1,224,400 articles printed. (Data provided by Kevin Guthrie, President
of JSTOR and cited in the U.S. National Academy of Sciences Report called LC21,
chapter 1, note 35)
· Academic Press usage at Yale sees a dramatic rise every
year (illustrative PPT slide was shown).
7. Electronic resources – a costly
phenomenon
Moreover,
electronic journals positively cry out to be accessed through
"gateway" services that seem to be even more costly than the journals
themselves. A number of our key indexing
and abstracting gateways cost my institution anywhere from US $20,000 -
$125,000 peryear. These are staggering prices.
It would be
reassuring to know that usage of these resources justifies the prices, but
there are some real obstacles to good usage data. Many online information providers do not
supply usage data at all, even after we have made repeated requests and they
have made repeated promises to supply it.
None provide data in ways that are compatible with that of other
information providers. We receive
reliable data from only about 29 vendors at this point. JSTOR does the best job, Silver Platter and
Elsevier Sceince do pretty well, and about 60% of those that do supply usage
data do so in a way that ranges from mediocre to unusable. The numbers we do have suggest high rates of
use and increasing use, but we all still know far too little – surely far too
little to use such data to help us make choices about our subscriptions for the
future.
Where
Things Stand Today
I cannot
recount this story without pausing to ask why we are really discussing
scholarly publications issues today in many of the same ways we did in the
1980s. What seemed a dozen years ago
like a situation spiraling out of control has remained somehow, vaguely, in
control. We have made some compromises –
reduction in the purchase of monographs to provide funds to pay for serials is
chief among them – and we have survived
The apparent
question, the one that brings us to the table, is this: How do we remake the communications
infrastructure to take best advantage of new technologies? When we ask that question, however, the
subtext question is much more pointed.
It goes to who will remake the
infrastructure – that is to say, who has power in this new scholarly
communications environment? What we as
librarians fear is that we will be rendered relatively powerless and
irrelevant. The anxiety that drives our
questions is the fear about our own future:
do we have one? Will information
providers price their resources to address directly the end-user or
"retail customer" and thus "disintermediate" the library as
information service provider? Fear and
hope live side by side, but fears of this kind are rarely either simply confirmed
or simply refuted. The good news is that
power is still widely distributed in the scholarly communications world and
bids fair to remain so.
Of course the
publishers have power. The strong STM
publishers like Elsevier ScienceDirect and Springer's SpringerLink, as well as
the large scientific societies continue to be unavoidable and powerful
players. The existing gateway providers
as well, such as ISI, have roles that continue and will continue. I have no idea what the next bullet point,
retained here in large font, may mean.
There are
other initiatives today that need to be tracked carefully in this area. The Electronic Society for Social Scientists
<www.elsss.org.uk> may be an unlikely contender in this field, while the
Public Library of Science (heatedly debated, most recently in the American
Congress:
http://www.publiclibraryofscience.org> is a stronger contender for
success and recognition. All these
issues are lively subjects of debate in the
1.
increase competition in the academic journal publishing marketplace
2. introduce a
fairer and more efficient way of producing, distributing, and consuming academic
journals whereby the large surpluses currently being earned by some commercial
publishers are redistributed to the individuals who make journals.
Governments have also recognized their power in this arena in the last
decade and undertaken various initiatives.
The PubScience initiative in the US has been threatened and seems at
this moment to be in reprieve (http://pubsci.osti.gov), while the more
ambitious PubMed initiative (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/PubMed) that would
require scientific research results funded by government grants to be placed on
the web for free distribution within a very short time of first publication,
remains the subject of much contention. PubScience is a free gateway service developed by the U.S.
Department of Energy, to facilitate accessing and searching peer reviewed
journal literature in the physical sciences and other energy-related
disciplines, as of
Not surprisingly, the strong not for profit players in the scholarly
publishing arena remain in play as well.
BioOne, for example, (http://www.bioone.org) is an example of consortial
e-publishing. It focuses on the biological, ecological, and environmental sciences. 2001 is first active subscription year. It offers an aggregation of the full texts of
about 40 small bioscience research journals, mostly from small societies and a
few not-for-profit publishers. Aim to
dramatically reduce costs to libraries.
Operating expenses are kept as low as possible in a virtual organization
with low overhead. It depends on in-kind
and cash contributions from "Founding Organizations" (Big 12, SPARC),
Amigos, other strategic partners and draws on a high level of
volunteerism. As the number of
subscribers increases, prices will drop (a positive feature of not-for-profit
publishing in particular). The only real
question is whether this level of idealism can be sustained.
Also in the not-for-profit sector is HighWire, based in
the Stanford Univeristy Library. As of
There are some new providers of free or inexpensive
journals. The World Health Organization
(http://www.who.int) and the Soros Foundation
(http://soros.epnet.com/eifl_description.html> have missions that run well
beyond the domain of scholarly publishing and can include free publishing
activities in their activities in support of that strategic purpose. HighWire Press also includes free material,
as indicated above, as part of its overall project.
A different
approach and view can be taken if we concentrate on the power that technolgoy
itself has to change the way people work .
The Open Archives Initiative (http://www.openarchives.org) is based on
technology rather than ideology and builds interoperability standards that
facilitate:
Author self-publishing/archiving of
article
Online retrieval of those articles
Effectively a global virtual archive
The underlying
concept is a powerful one that can be applied to other digital formats (besides
articles and can be applied to paid content.
But libraries
are far from powerless in this world as well.
HighWire and OAI register the power of innovation that has come from within
our community. SPARC, as outlined above,
has been powerful at telling its story and is having at least the first stages
of success in creating new journals:
whether those become important pieces of the system remains to be
seen. Less ostentatiously, the power of
the library community to organize together in consortia that cooperate to share
resources and in particular to license electronic information resources for
readers, have a record of real achievement for their users and for the
scholarly community as a whole.
It is in just
such cooperation that libraries find their strongest new resources. In traditional formats, cooperation was
difficult: physical materials are
site-specific and need to be moved around with great difficulty and cost. Zbut with electronic formats, materials can
be available to all equally. Given the
propensity of publishers to make electronic information available under
licensing agreements, electronic information is particularly suited for
consortial arrangements bringing together many library customers in a single
purchasing group. The alrger the
consortium, the greater the benefits of joint licensing. Such consortia can be defined in many ways,
including close relationships among a specific group for a continuing period or
alternately entirely ad hoc and temporary.
With electronic journal package deals, small increments in investment
can bring huge benefits: we've seen this
at Yale with Elsevier particularly.
Let me give a
detailed example, arising from the experience of the Northeast Research
Libraries Consortium (NERL) with the Academic Press familyi of journals. If our 23 schools had subscribed independetly
to the print versions of AP journals in 1999-2000, it would have cost us
$2,165,517, but the consortial cost to the whole group was $1,988,839. This does not seem to be a great saving, but
in the print regime, the average institution in NERL was subscribing to 71
journals before our license arrangement began.
But of the X00 AP journals, the average institution in NERL was in fact
using 167 on average after the licensing arrangement began. Thus for a slight reduction in cost, we
gained a huge increase in functionality overall. Schools with higher prior print holdings
benefitted less (about a 19% increase in number of journals accessed), while
smaller institutions (such as RPI and Skidmore) saw huge increases (some 60+%).
My conviction
arising from this set of observations is that librarians still have in fact
considerable power to influence our and our institutions' futures. The individual librarian is now already what
fashion speaks of as a "knowledge worker". We are close to our users and we meet their
content and service needs, without primarily being concerned with format or
means of access. Our key roles are
evolving as ones of selection, access, and support: places where we add and continue to add real
value. We will undeniably have a part o
play in the evolution of e-archiving: we
have the independence to give credibility and assurance to archiving
enterprises, and we have the motivation to consolidate our low-use print
collections and replace collections that take up substantial space and costs
with more functional resources. We are
supporting those roles by the way we are devloping our business and legal
savvy, developing the technological expertise to supoprt our needs, and
continually updating our skills. That is
a true and valid model for the future of librarianship.
So let me
close with a few prophecies – or platitudes, true and important, I think, for
giving us the inspiration and direction we need.
First, ours is
and remains a rapidly expanding and evolving information universe. In that world we must all hang together, or
we will surely all hang separately. We
will work with other libraries to establish patterns of sharing, with
publishers to develop business approaches, and with our universities in the
political arena. We can and will icense
our resources globally and serve our readers locally. Information will never be free, or cheap: but knowledge workers will never be obsolete.
**************
Here let me
just append a list of select readings that can support and develop some of my
themes or perhaps provide the reader with ways and means of quarreling with
what I have to say.