Symposium on the Future of Scholarly Communication
By Ed FeltenWelcome! For the next two weeks or so, we’ll be conducting an online symposium on the future of academic publishing. We’ve convened a strong group of panelists for a discussion in blog (or serial essay) format. Our panelists include Paul DiMaggio (Professor of Sociology, Princeton), Ed Felten (Professor of Computer Science and Public Affairs, Princeton), Ira Fuchs (V.P. for Research in Information Technology, Mellon Foundation), Stan Katz (Public and International Affairs, Princeton, and President Emeritus, American Council of Learned Societies), David Robinson (Associate Director, Center for Information Technology Policy, Pinceton), and Peter Suber (Senior Researcher at SPARC).
Our discussion was sparked by a report, University Publishing In A Digital Age released by Ithaka in July, which offers good background on our topic. If we could assign homework to you, our readers, we would ask you to read the Ithaka report.
The report offers this summary (pp. 4-5):
Publishing in the future will look very different than it has looked in the past. Consumption patterns have already changed dramatically, as many scholars have increasingly begun to rely on electronic resources to get information that is useful to their research and teaching. Transformation on the creation and production sides is taking longer, but ultimately may have an even more profound impact on the way scholars work. Publishers have made progress putting their legacy content online, especially with journals. We believe the next stage will be the creation of new formats made possible by digital technologies, ultimately allowing scholars to work in deeply integrated electronic research and publishing environments that will enable real-time dissemination, collaboration, dynamically-updated content, and usage of new media.
[…]
What will, or should, the future scholarly communications system look like? First, every university that produces research should have a publishing strategy, but that does not mean that it should have a “press”. Much of the content produced in the future will be disseminated electronically, and a new constellation of skills (including some that currently reside in presses, as well as those from libraries and IT groups) will be required to do this most effectively. Second, in the digital environment certain activities and assets (e.g. technology development, marketing) will be consolidated onto large scale platforms. These new digital publishing activities are central to the research and teaching missions of universities, and it therefore seems critically important that the university community be able to influence strongly the development of these platforms to insure that they support long held university values, rather than allowing them to be driven primarily by commercial incentives. And thirdd, as the environment evolves, university presses will no doubt change. Some universities will encourage and enable their presses to grow and take more of a leadership role. Other institutions may decide to open new presses. Others may close their presses or let their presses evolve into more specialized enterprises with a focus on editorial and credentialing services while depending on others for core infrastructure and marketing services. What seems clear is that to succeed presses are going to need to be a more important partner in helping their host institutions to fulfill their research and teaching missions.
Though I would endorse much of what the report says, I want to offer one difference here. I think the commercial sphere has much to teach us and many useful tools to offer. This symposium, for example, is powered by low-cost commercial hardware and software that was easily adapted to our purpose — just an ordinary web server, the free WordPress software package, and two hours of setup time. This is not exactly what we would design given an infinite budget, but it’s pretty good. We can get started right away, and along the way we’ll learn more about what we want from the perfect system.
I expect the system of our dreams to be cheaper, less centralized, and less infrastructure-intensive than the report envisions. Publishing documents, audio, and video is no longer rocket science; and commercial indexing and search facilities are as good as anything we could build. Combining ordinary technologies in obvious ways will get us 90% or more of what we want. And 90% of what we want, available right now at low cost, seems like a great deal.
For now, most of the remaining 10% is better served by diverse experimentation than by infrastructure building. When the dust settles — when we have a clearer idea of what we want from our publishing system, and when commercial technologies have advanced a bit further — we can proceed with building our dream system. Whether that will require centralization or significant infrastructure remains to be seen.
I’m eager to hear what my fellow panelists have to say. Let the discussion begin!
October 15th, 2007 at 8:28 am
Impact-Seeking vs. Income-Seeking Content and “Gold” vs. “Green” OA
Stevan Harnad
My comment is only about the Open Access aspects of the report and topic under discussion, in particular, distinguishing two kinds of content (give-away and non-give-away) and two kinds of Open Access (”Gold” and “Green”).
Open Access means free online access. Its target content in the first instance is peer-reviewed journal articles, because all such articles, without exception, are written and published solely for uptake and usage in further research, not for author fees or royalties. This distinction between impact-seeking and income-seeking content is fundamental to any contemplation of the future of scholarly publication in general, digital publication in particular, and university publication even more particularly. Books, for example, are a mix of impact-seeking and income-seeking, and this makes their digital future not nearly as clear as that of peer-reviewed journal articles.
The ITHAKA study also seems to treat Open Access as if it were synonymous with Open Access Publishing. In reality, Open Access (OA) journal publishing (”Gold OA”) is only one of the two ways to provide OA, and not the fastest or surest way, which is OA self-archiving (”Green OA”): Authors deposit, in their own Institutional Repository (or a Central Repository), their final, revised, accepted, peer-reviewed drafts (”postprints”) of journal articles published in non-OA (or OA) journals. Green OA is fastest and surest because it can be (and is being) mandated by universities and research funders. Gold OA cannot be mandated; it depends on publishers’ willingness to convert to Gold OA and universities’ and funders’ willingness and ability to pay the extra cost. (It is possible, however, that mandated Green OA itself will eventually drive a transition to Gold OA.)
Harnad, S. (2007) The Green Road to Open Access: A Leveraged Transition. In: Anna Gacs (ed.) The Culture ofPeriodicals from the Perspective of the Electronic Age.
L’Harmattan. 99-106. http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/13309/
October 17th, 2007 at 9:33 pm
As the EIC of a journal sponsored by a scientific society, the American Roentgen Ray Society, I have followed the OA issue closely. My comments were published in an Editor’s Notebook of the October 2007 issue of the AJR. Here it is:
DOI:10.2214/AJR.07.6624
AJR 2007; 189:753-754
© American Roentgen Ray Society
The Open Access Issue Revisited
Robert J. Stanley, Editor in Chief
rstanley@uabmc.edu
Since becoming the Editor in Chief of the AJR in the summer of 2003, I have been most interested in the “Open Access” (OA) business and funding model for scientific publications. In an interesting article in the Journal of Thrombosis and Hemostasis (JTH), Andrew Robinson presents the viewpoint of a commercial publisher on this subject [1]. He defines OA, paraphrasing the BioMed Central (BMC) Open Access Charter, as: “When the author grants to all users a free, irrevocable, worldwide perpetual right of access to and license to copy, use, distribute, transcribe, and display the work publicly in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship” [1].
According to Robinson, OA manifests itself in two ways: (1) as author-pays journals that allow anyone to access all articles free of charge (there is no subscription charge; the journal covers the cost of publication through subsidies, sponsorships, or by charging authors—or the authors’ funding body or employer—a fee to publish their material); (2) as institutional or subject repositories, which are online collections of materials, including research papers. In this latter model, the repository would be managed by a university, an institution, or a funding body. Research papers archived in these repositories would not necessarily be peer reviewed or formally copyedited. The publishers would be responsible for the cost of organizing the review process.
The American Roentgen Ray Society is a member of a group of not-for-profit medical and scientific societies and publishers known as the Washington, DC Principles Group for Free Access to Science, which was formed in 2004. Members of this group adhere to the following guidelines:
Certain very important and timely articles will be available free of charge online from the time of publication;
The full text of articles will be made freely available within a specified period of time after publication;
The scientific content of the journals will be made free to scientists and physicians in low-income nations; and
The content of the journals will be available for indexing by major search engines, so that readers worldwide will have easy access to it.
Not long after the formation of the DC Principles group, the contents of the AJR were made freely accessible 2 years after publication. When a variety of studies showed that the majority of hits for online articles occurred primarily within the first 12 months of publication and dropped significantly thereafter, the AJR, in May 2007, shortened the timeframe for free availability to 12 months. While this does not meet the OA goal of being instantly available upon publication, it certainly increases the online accessibility of the AJR content.
As many of our readers are aware, Nobel Laureate Harold Varmus has been the driving force behind OA. He promoted the development of PubMed, a resource that is constantly used by our readers, authors, and reviewers. In October 2000, Varmus, along with Patrick Brown and Michael Eisen, cofounded the Public Library of Science (PLoS). This advocacy group was founded on the principle that if the scientific publishers, many of whom are for-profit, were unprepared to act in the best interest of science and participate in OA, then the research community that supplied all of the material for these publications would flex their muscles and force them to cooperate. PLoS’s first action was to circulate an open letter encouraging scientific publishers to make their research literature available for distribution through free online public archives such as the U.S. National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central [3]. This letter, signed by nearly 34,000 scientists from 180 countries, prompted significant steps by many scientific publishers toward freer access to published research. Not surprisingly, the publishers’Responses fell far short of the reasonable policies advocated. And, while well intended, very few of the researchers remained committed to their principles and stopped sending their submissions to these journals, which largely ignored the mandate for making their scientific content freely available.
Several years ago, at the urging of the PLoS, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) requested, but did not mandate, that researchers funded by the federal government deposit copies of their final research papers in PubMed Central. After 2 ineffective years of the NIH policy, the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate have backed provisions in their respective 2008 Labor Health and Education Appropriations bills that will require the final published papers of NIH-funded researchers to be deposited in PubMed Central. While the advocacy groups consider this an important step for public access to research, additional language in both bills states “NIH shall implement the public access policy in a manner consistent with copyright law.” It appears in the minds of some that this single sentence will essentially vitiate this mandate. Brian Crawford [4], chair of the Association of American Publishers Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division Executive Committee, states, “The mandatory deposit of copyrighted articles in an online government site for worldwide distribution is in fundamental, inherent, and unavoidable conflict with the rights of copyright holders in those works.” His comments indicate that if the bill becomes law, publishers likely will challenge its legality based on existing copyright law.
As I have attempted to familiarize myself with the pros and cons of OA, I have realized that many of the arguments of the OA advocates have not yet been shown to hold water. In the same JTH article cited above, the author continued by discussing the five strands to the open access argument, which he listed as:
the library funding crisis,
the lack of access impeding research,
the right to access publicly funded research,
the needs of the developing world, and
the profits of scholarly societies and publishers.
Regarding the library funding crisis, OA advocates claim that prices that are set by profitmaximizing publishers are determined not by costs but by what the market will bear. Thus, for the high-profit publishers, the overhead charges are more than adequately covered by the excessive subscription fees to the universities, who produced the knowledge, as well as to the individual subscribers. In contrast, the American Roentgen Ray Society is able to keep its subscription prices relatively low and make the publication more widely accessible, thanks to the subsidization of editorial input by the universities. Bergstrom and McAfee [5] suggest that a university should form a list of the expensive journals and have a policy that discourages faculty participation in the operation of these journals unless the university can receive overhead expenses related to the journal participation. This would be an example of a university flexing its muscle, which in essence is the product of their faculty. These authors cite a Website that lists the prices of approximately 5,000 academic journals [6].
Another commentary by Edwin V. Sperr, Jr. [7] presents arguments in favor of the Open Access concept. He, too, emphasizes that librarians and scholars need to work together to preserve the system of scholarly communication and that researchers must realize the power they have and demand more open access to their own work.
Concerning the library funding crisis, budgets for university libraries have been falling at the same time that the subscription costs to the libraries have increased. And this occurs at a time when research and development have been increasing and more studies are being submitted for publication. BMC, an OA publisher launched in May of 2000, was initially thought to be the answer for hard-pressed university libraries. As stated in their online Website: “The traditional business model for scientific publishers relies on restricting access to published research, in order to recoup the costs of the publication process. This restriction of access to published research prevents full use being made of digital technologies, and is contrary to the interests of authors, funders, and the scientific community as a whole. The traditional subscription-based model is also becoming increasingly unsustainable, as increasing amounts of research is being published while library budgets remain static” [8].
It is, however, becoming increasingly clear that there is a rising production cost for the OA publishers as well as the non-OA publishers. And who pays the cost? According to John Sack [9], in a recent letter, the largest research institutions have to foot the largest bill in the author-pays model, so it concentrates— rather than distributes—the cost. Furthermore, the largest research institutions have requested that their libraries pay these “membership” costs since the costs sound exactly like subscriptions. Some libraries around the country have provided funding for this new OA model so that it could be tested. However, BMC has had to increase its charge to the libraries as its start-up funds were exhausted and further subsidization was uncertain. Because of the rising costs, several prominent universities around the country have cancelled their membership in BMC. Columbia University dropped out in 2006. Yale University ended its support for BMC in July 2007. Emory University also discontinued its membership as the cost continued to rise. Thus, it appears that OA will not solve the library funding crisis in the near future.
There are no data as of yet to show that the lack of access to published literature is impeding research. The overall online availability of journals appears to have enhanced rather than impeded research. A study by Thompson–ISI, the creators of the journal Impact Factor, analyzed 148 OA journals in the natural sciences. They concluded: “To date, no clear effect has been observed. Though there is some suggestion in aggregate of a slightly more rapid accumulation of citations, this effect is, so far, minimal. The wide distribution of these OA journals has not yet been shown to have any appreciable effect on their appearance in lists of cited references in other journals” [10].
At least with regard to research in radiology, I have not been able to rationalize the outcry for publicly funded research being accessible to the public. It is my impression that the scholarly communication system in medicine is not designed for communication between researchers and the public at large. Television, radio, newspapers, and other types of patient information from medical societies such as the ARRS do a better job. The ARRS is a participant in a new project called patientINFORM, which has been created by the American Heart Association, the American Diabetes Association, and the American Cancer Society [11]. PatientINFORM creates articles that relate to important papers published in multiple journals from 23 different medical publishers and societies. It is unreasonable that the entire journal system should be strong-armed into conforming to the OA concept, especially considering that a very large amount of the research in radiology is not government funded.
With regard to the needs of the developing world, access to the journals does not appear to be the real problem. Rather, the fundamental problem appears to be lack of basic infrastructure, such as functioning libraries with computers capable of accessing the Internet or communities of active researchers capable of using all of the available information.
OA advocates believe that publishers and societies are making unjustifiable profits from the publication of their journals. Admittedly, some of the commercial publishers do operate with a sizable profit margin. But most of the societies, such as the American Roentgen Ray Society, are not-for-profit and they just break even. The ARRS runs conferences, educates its members through the AJR and newsletters, offers CME, scholarships and fellowships, and even funds research through its Scholar Program. Not surprisingly, societies such as ARRS are asking for caution and fiscal responsibility in the rush to provide OA. Any new model of scholarly communication must be sustainable. A recent survey titled “The Facts About Open Access” [12] would suggest that many of the OA journals are struggling to stay alive. At least from the data, there is sparse evidence that the author-pays model is creating a sustainable challenge to the existing subscription model.
References
Top
References
Robinson A. Open access: the view of a commercial publisher. J Thromb Hemost 2006;4 : 1454–1460[CrossRef]
http://www.dcprinciples.org/. Accessed August 16, 2007
http://www.plos.org/about/letter.html. Accessed August 16, 2007
http://www.libraryjournal.com/info/CA6461068.html. Accessed August 16, 2007
Bergstrom T, McAfee RP. An open letter to all university presidents and provosts concerning increasingly expensive journals. http://www.hss.caltech.edu/~mcafee/Journal/OpenLetter.pdf. Accessed August 16, 2007
http://www.journalprices.com/. Accessed August 16, 2007
Sperr EV. Libraries and the future of scholarly communication. Molecular Cancer 2006;5 :58[CrossRef][Medline]
http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/about/whatis. Accessed August 16, 2007
Sack J. Letter. http://publisher.highwire.org:80/Publishers/cgi-bin/Forum.cgi?class=Publishers&subject=Ebiomed&msgid=1486. Accessed August 16, 2007
Testa J, McVeigh M. The impact factor of open access journals—a citation study from Thomson–ISI. http://scientific.thomson.com/media/presentrep/acropdf/impact-oa-journals.pdf. Accessed May 5, 2006
patientInform. Voluntary health organizations, publishers announce major information initiative, December 8, 2004. http://www.patientinform.org/press-releases/2004/12/8/voluntary-helath-organizations-publishers-announce-major-information-initiative-december-8-2004.html. Accessed August 20, 2007
Kaufman-Wills Group. The facts about open access. ALPSP 2005. http://www.alpsp.org/publications/FAOA-complete-REV.pdf. Accessed May 5, 2006
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October 19th, 2007 at 7:33 am
First of all, you folks need to be made aware that the Ithaka Report is posted on a site at Michigan that permits ongoing commentary: http://scholarlypublishing.org/ithakareport. I encourage anyone who posts to this symposium to review the comments already made there and contribute some of your own.
As current president of the AAUP, I also must say that I am puzzled that this symposium was launched at a university having a university press but without any involvement by anyone at the press as co-convenor of the symposium. This seems a particularly egregious oversight for a discussion of the Ithaka Report, which was motivated in the first instance by a concern for the future of university presses and whose principal author, Laura Brown, came out of a scholarly publishing background as former head of Oxford-USA.
Marginalizing university presses seems to have become a habit of people organizing such conferences, symposia, and study groups in recent years. It happened with the ACLS report on cyberinfrastructure for the humanities and social sciences issued last year and also with the Berkman Center report on copyright and scholarly communication. If you are going to have an intelligent and informed discussion of the future of scholarly publishing, it would seem that you really ought to involve the people who are doing this job on a daily basis now. Would you have a symposium about the future of teaching without involving teachers?
Finally, I invite everyone who reads this to look for my forthcoming article about the Ithaka Report in the November issue of Against the Grain.
October 25th, 2007 at 11:23 am
I’m not sure how to submit a reply to the posts by Paul DiMaggio and David Robinson discussing the Ithaka Report’s suggestion that university presses need to become better integrated into the missions of their universities, so I’ll post it here.
”
I was interested in Paul’s reference to the collective-action problem. This is exactly how I put it in my forthcoming article in Against the Grain. Allow me to quote the relevant paragraphs:
“What underlies the predicament of presses—though not expressed by the Report in these economistic terms—is at heart a problem stemming from the logic of collective action, as identified in the classic book by Mancur Olson published by Harvard in 1965. With 88 presses in the U.S. serving the entire community of scholarship worldwide, the nearly 3,000 institutions of higher education that do not directly support presses benefit as “free riders” on the system. And with the presses at their own institutions mostly serving faculty elsewhere, as noted in the Report, administrators do not give a high priority to thinking about or funding their local presses since the immediate impact on their own institutions is small relative to the presses’ contribution to the overall “public good” of disseminating knowledge. This contrasts sharply with the situation of libraries, of course, since libraries are first and foremost dedicated to serving their immediate constituency of local faculty and students. Funding for libraries is thus defensible “politically” in a way it is not for presses. It is not so surprising, viewed in this context, that “provosts put limited resources and attention towards what they perceive to be a service to the broader community” and that “over time, and in pursuit of the largest public service to the global academic community, presses have tended to grow disconnected from the administrations at their host universities” (p. 17). As businesses and even entire national economies do, presses must develop niches where they can have the best “comparative advantage” vis-à-vis competitors and achieve “economies of scale” in publishing that derive from concentrating resources in a few special fields. They even operate at a disadvantage with respect to faculty at their home institutions since “they actually often prefer to publish their books at presses other than their own, because institutional distance avoids any suggestion of favoritism and provides external validation” (p. 17).
The pressures that presses are under to survive as businesses further exacerbate their disconnection from their parent universities, which do not help matters by sending inconsistent signals to their presses. The presses “feel they are held to a different standard than all the cost centers on campus, that they are essentially penalized for pursuing a cost recovery model, which then becomes the basis for evaluating their performance. When they perform well (in financial terms), they are ‘rewarded’ by having their subsidies cut. When they run too large a deficit, they are threatened with closure. Some have responded to these expectations by elevating cost-recovery in their selection criteria, publishing more trade books and shying away from the least marketable fields. This approach may improve their financial situation, while at the same time undermining the case for subsidies.” I would add that this strategy also raises questions about whether the press is truly serving the best interests of the scholarly community, too, by preferring trade books for a general audience over monographs needed to advance scholarship. The more a press strives for financial solvency by going the trade route, the more it risks becoming irrelevant to the mission of higher education. This kind of Catch-22 helps explain the disconnection that the Report sees between what presses currently do and what the missions of their parent universities are.”
I further note this predicament for presses:
In recommending that presses integrate themselves better into the missions and priorities of their parent universities, the Report does not have much to say about one obvious challenge that most presses face: being located at major research universities where science and engineering play a dominant role in securing external funding, and where at many of them professional schools in business, law, and medicine also contribute in substantial ways to their prestige, very few presses publish in these fields. The results of the survey of presses the Ithaka Group conducted, as summarized in charts in Appendix E, reveal that the title output of books published by presses in STM, for example, is less than 10%, and even lower for business and law. Those small number of presses that do publish in science concentrate almost exclusively on theoretical rather than applied science. Although a handful of presses have announced plans to begin publishing books in business, Stanford is alone among major U.S. presses now that have oriented their publishing programs to emphasize professional publishing more. And in law, while many presses publish in peripheral areas like international law and philosophy of law, hardly any presses publish in the hard core areas of torts and contracts, for example; constitutional law is about the only central area of law in which university presses regularly publish. So, how do presses become more crucial contributors to their universities if they stay out of these scientific and professional fields of publishing, either by necessity (owing to the high entry cost of competing against giant commercial publishers now dominating these fields) or choice (owing to their traditional allegiances to the liberal arts)? The Report does not say. The closest it comes occurs in Appendix C, where “recommendations to press directors” call on them, among other things, to “take an inventory of the exciting new academic ventures at their institutions, and consider which ones might lend themselves to publishing programs, [and] they should reach out to professional schools to form publishing alliances and joint ventures” (p. 39). The best advice comes, rather, from Joe Esposito, who recommends in his article that presses, taking advantage of their greater promixate access to scholars and emerging trends in academic disciplines, should “identify new areas of scholarship and dominate them before a commercial organization even gets started,” as he notes that the MIT Press did with cognitive science, a field in which it has become a dominant publisher able to stave off competition from the commercial sector. One possible avenue here is for the presses in the Big Ten and Chicago (through the academic consortium known as the Committee on Institutional Cooperation) to work with the CIC libraries on collaborative projects extending the shared digital repository that they have agreed to establish from their partnership with Google in digitizing special collections that represent strengths of their own universities across many disciplines including the sciences.”
With this teaser, I hope you all will read the entire article when it comes out next month.