how it used to work •With a small side-trip into interlibrary loan •The Big Deal •Open access •Stuff I could have turned into issue-brief topics but didn’t because I didn’t want to overload this week •... yeah, I kind of know too much about all this. •I’m boiling it down as best I can.
I’m 100% biased toward increased access to the scholarly literature! •You aren’t obligated to agree with me, just to understand the issues. •Want to give me h-e-double-hockey-sticks on the forums? Go for it! •But I will contend that my bias is a LIBRARIANLY bias. It is a bias that fits well with librarianship’s ethics and mission.
know this!) •Author writes article. •Author submits article to journal. •Editor gives article a quick once-over; if it passes, editor sends article to peer reviewers. •Peer reviewers say yes/yes-but-revise/no. •If no, usually author will submit to a different journal, whereupon the whole process starts over from zero. •If yes, journal (eventually) publishes article. •After (this is important!) securing a copyright transfer (usually) or a license of some sort (rare, but happens) from the author.
unpaid. (No advances, no royalties, nada.) •Peer reviewers are unpaid. •Most editors are unpaid. (Some, at major publishers, are paid.) •What? Seriously?! What a racket! How do they get away with this? •Remember last week, how I said that academia is a reputation economy? This is where that plays out. •Scientists have to publish in “the right” peer-reviewed journals or lose their careers. Payment would be superfluous. •Peer reviewing and editing are considered “service.” Which counts, if not much, toward tenure/promotion.
several kinds of editing, file conversion for online use, metadata creation, CrossRef (DOIs), etc. •Infrastructure, including paywall infrastructure (how perverse is it that libraries pay money to publishers that goes toward restricting information access?!) •Salespeople and lawyers; swag producers and conferences (think about this the next time you go to a publisher-sponsored party at a library conference) •Lots of this is commodity-priced, meaning there’s lots of competition so prices are quite low. Or non-profit (CrossRef). •The publisher! •Profit margins on STEM journal publishing are OBSCENE. Last figures I heard hovered around 25-40%. Even during recessions!
We Will Read.” http://blog.findings.com/post/ 20527246081/how-we-will-read-clay-shirky •Some scientists claim that they do all the typesetting, editing, etc. for the journals they publish in. They may be mostly right. •Or they may just not see a lot of labor expended on their behalf. •But their experience doesn’t generalize, AND doesn’t capture the entirety of the workflow anyway. •Metadata? Getting metadata to aggregators? Preservation? Running a website? •So take this with a giant grain of salt. •NeuroDojo takes it on very well in http://neurodojo.blogspot.ca/2014/04/ publishing-may-be-button-but-publishing.html
easy... •Subscribe to journal (at a markup compared to an individual subscription, but everybody knew that; it was okay). •Receive print copy of journal as issues come out. “Claim” issues that for whatever reason don’t arrive or are damaged. •Rebind a bunch of issues at intervals; shelve indefinitely. •Loan out or photocopy for interlibrary loan, patron service. •All of this on the level of individual journals! •So collection developers could pick what they thought was most useful, cancel what wasn’t. •Feedback loop for journals: if a journal was lousy, libraries could and did unsubscribe. No revenue, no journal.
things. •Including journals! •But libraries recognized a potential unfairness. •One library buys something, ILLs it around indefinitely. Another library never buys anything, serving patrons solely via ILL. Both legal (first sale!), but ethically dubious at best. •CONTU Rule of Five: if you’ve ILLed it five times in a calendar year, you should buy it, or get it some other way. •(CONTU = Commission on New Technological Uses of Copyrighted Works. I never remember it.) •For a journal: five ARTICLES from that journal in a year means you should buy/license it instead of ILLing any more from it.
to eliminate it outright for journals (print or electronic). •Through lousy licensing deals •Through propaganda •Europe: no ILL across country boundaries! •Ebooks? Uh... •Practically nobody knows how to do this yet. •But if it goes the way of e-journals...
markup. •If anybody tells you the “serials crisis” is new or purely digital, please laugh at them. I heard about it from my anthropologist dad when I was eight. I’m in my 40s. •But my dad was an exception. For the most part, this happened and faculty didn’t notice or care. They didn’t get the bills! (Where have we heard THIS before?!) •If libraries cancelled journals, it didn’t matter. Publishers could just start new ones with the same inflated markup. Faculty mostly didn’t notice, again. •The move to digital •And the loss of first-sale rights. It’s all licensing now! We know how that goes. •Digital ILL? For journals, only if it’s in the license deal. There are journal contracts that stipulate that libraries have to print out a digital ILL, and the patron has to come to the physical library to retrieve it. Yes, really! •Disciplinary (and therefore journal) proliferation •Journal-publisher mergers/buyouts and journal buy-ups •And digital + mergers/buyouts = bundling: the “Big Deal.”
article you read) •Publisher/aggregator: •“O hai liberriez! U want e-journals? U CAN HAZ ALL OUR E-JOURNALS! For one low, low price!” •Libraries, faculty: “Wow, sounds great!” •Ken Frazier: “It’s a trap!” Libraries, faculty: “... huh?” •Publisher: “O hai liberriez...” •“... we’re raising our prices. Yes, again. Suck it up.” •“... you can’t cancel lousy journals any more; it’s all or nothing. If you want the Journal of Indispensable Results, you also have to buy the Journal of Lousy Plagiarized Reprints.” Buh-bye, feedback loop! •“Look! More journals! What do you mean, nobody wanted them?”
see a nominal price for a Big Deal. Don’t you believe it! Ever! •One of the major jobs of an e-resources librarian is to negotiate Big Deal prices and licensing terms. You get the bargain you can convince the publisher to accept. (Or vice versa!) •“Historical spend” as basis for current pricing •Roughly, “Here’s what you spent on our print journals twenty years ago. If you maintained that same package, you’d pay $X. With inflation... and additional journals... and anything else we can think of to add on... that’s $BIG_NUMBER.” •As a transitional pricing scheme, I guess I can see this? But today, it’s nonsensical. The transition’s long over! •Per-student, per-FTE, per-faculty-member, ugh.
disclosing the terms or price of a licensing deal •Including, supposedly, while negotiations are in progress. You can see how that makes negotiations harder for the library. •For public universities, may conflict with state sunshine laws. What little we actually know about real-world journal pricing comes from sunshine-law (often called “FOIA”) requests! •What do we know? That comparable libraries get VERY different deals. And NDAs keep us from sharing knowledge to understand why! •“Pluralistic ignorance:” because no one shares info, everyone thinks it’s just them...
laws” •http://www.attemptingelegance.com/?p=2395 •tl;dr version: a content-vendor’s contract insisted that Jenica’s library had to help the vendor minimize sunshine-law disclosures. •Jenica, paraphrased: “You have got to be @#$%& kidding me. No.” •But how many libraries have already signed such terms? How many have the guts to buck a vendor at all? •Not enough, that’s how many. We are a pusillanimous breed. •We are also caught between rocks and hard places. If we refuse to sign a contract on this or any other basis, will faculty back us, or will they try to get us fired because we’re not buying the content they want?
library. •One of your library’s Big Deals just handed you a whopping price increase. With attached NDA. •What are your options? •Note: Using L-Space or the library’s TARDIS to go back in time and prevent the Big Deal signing is not an option. Sorry. •At this point, the number of academic libraries that never signed Big Deals is essentially zero.
I kidding here? •I mean, a few libraries do, as a stopgap. But that ship has sailed; everybody wants digital. •Grow your budget •We’ve tried. It’s not an option these days. Just forget it. Wouldn’t matter if you did anyway. •Cancel the Big Deal •May not be an option! You’ll lose some prize journals and not be able to get them back. •Or re-buying the prize journals won’t save you any money over the Big Deal. •Buy consortially, to increase buying power •This has been going on for decades. Yet faculty still trot this out as though it’s a new idea. Oh, faculty. They’re so cute... except not. •Publishers simply raise prices for consortia! Long-term, THIS TACTIC DOES NOT HELP. It just puts off the day of reckoning, kicks the can down the road a bit. •Cancel journals unaffiliated with Big Deals •Move budget money away from other materials. Buh-bye, monographs.
•Cancelled first, to pay for Big Deals •Many bought up by (or eagerly sold to/shared with) Big Deal purveyors in order to be added to Big Deals and stay afloat •Monographs!!!!! •And the publishers who publish them. •(But catch those publishers complaining about Big Deals! Why? Because a lot of them make their real money off journals.) •(Not staff. In libraries, staff and materials come out of different budget buckets.) •But that doesn’t stop faculty and administrators complaining about library staff budgets when they see journal cancellations!
the wall on funding these. THERE IS NO MORE MONEY. NONE. •There also are no more “lesser” journals to cancel. •Both libraries and publishers are in denial about this. •We: “need to educate faculty!” No, we needed to educate faculty decades ago. Anyone who hasn’t by now is in trouble. •They: buying each other (and indie journals) up to play a game of Survivor: Publishers. Who will be the last one on the island? •No two ways about it: the next three to five years will be ugly, ugly, ugly for publishers and libraries.
radar as possible, because librarians (rightly) fear faculty backlash. •Which there... hasn’t been much of, say the pioneers. •It’s less hidden than it was, and libraries are starting to prepare for it with education and PR. A few articles are trickling out, even! •Usually sheer necessity. Publishers are killing their own golden goose here. •But as I said, many academic libraries are still deep in denial. •Those are the libraries that I predict will be in the most trouble when the inevitable happens.
favor of buying on-demand individual-article access. •The big problem with this: only the one patron can ever use that article. Economies of scale? What are those? •Actual collection development? What’s that? •Rock. Hard place. Shrug.
want from universities and their libraries... •... for access to (not even ownership of!) stuff that university faculty made that publishers aren’t even PAYING them for? •And people who can’t pay can’t read the stuff? •I hope your social-justice nerves are twitching! •In essence, yeah. Ain’t that a p.... redicament. •Bethany Nowviskie: Fight Club Soap •http://nowviskie.org/2010/fight-club-soap/
commonly-accepted definition: •Open-access (OA) literature is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. What makes it possible is the internet and the consent of the author or copyright-holder. •In most fields, scholarly journals do not pay authors, who can therefore consent to OA without losing revenue... •OA is entirely compatible with peer review, and all the major OA initiatives for scientific and scholarly literature insist on its importance... •OA literature is not free to produce, even if it is less expensive to produce than conventionally published literature. The question is not whether scholarly literature can be made costless, but whether there are better ways to pay the bills than by charging readers and creating access barriers. Business models for paying the bills depend on how OA is delivered.
of publisher policies around green open access •“Can I put my article in a repository? What version?” •Juliet: grant-funder open-access and open-data policies •Use a search engine; don’t memorize the URL. I do. •Directory of Open Access Journals (doaj.org) •What it says on the tin, but also... •... open-access journal preservation program, and •... open-access journal quality standards, and •... title-level and limited article-level search engine for open- access journals.
happen? •Green OA: through a repository, institutional or disciplinary •(Or author websites, though that’s a lousy option. Why? Use your common sense and your knowledge of campus IT policies.) •Gold OA: through an online journal that lets everyone read its content for free via the Web •Gratis and libre OA: exactly how open is it? •Gratis: you can download and read, but legally, that’s it. •Libre: licensed (usually via CC-BY) for reuse, including text-mining, value-add services, and (controversially) republication •Personally, I despise zealotry. It’s done OA damage. •Green or gold, who cares? Open is open. Different strokes. •I acknowledge that libre is better than gratis, but I also know that gratis is a lot better than paywalled!
•This is ridiculously false and always has been. •To some extent, confusion of green and gold OA; most repos accept non-peer-reviewed (or not-reviewed-yet) materials •“OA journals = author pays.” •This is closer to the truth than many OA advocates want to admit, frankly. (Zealotry, again.) •It is true that the vast bulk of OA journals do not charge author-side fees. It’s also true that many subscription journals do! •BUT it is ALSO true that journals with author-side fees publish the majority of gold-OA articles! (STEM, pretty much.) •Who wins from myth-spreading? Subscription publishers. •And they do it! Read about the PRISM Coalition sometime. •And a lot of unwise faculty believe the myths, which is infuriating.
repositories got their start this way. PubMedCentral. •In-kind support •This way, too. arXiv started as a faculty project! •The problem is that faculty tend to get bored or overwhelmed with this work. A few would-be disciplinary repos have folded because of this. •LIBRARIES •If there’s an institutional repository and/or ETD repo, the library is running it, possibly with an assist from campus IT. All but guaranteed. •Libraries run and pay for a lot of disciplinary repos too. (Little-known fact, especially among faculty. Most physicists have no idea that Cornell University Libraries runs arXiv and libraries all over the place pay for it.)
•Well, from an access perspective, yeah, duh. For a lot of people it’s all there is! That’s part of the point of green! •But no, the real question is “will libraries stop subscribing?” Magic 8-Ball says “unclear.” •Hasn’t happened except on a very small scale... yet. •But even if it does... is that necessarily a problem? •That is the question that terrifies toll-access journal publishers! •I ain’t crying for them. I don’t think you should be either. •A system without them would be different, granted. But it might well be better. Certainly better for access!
and authors. •Libraries and individual subscribers pay subscriptions. •Many STEM journals also charge author-side fees: color art charges, “page charges,” charges for late edits (“alts”), etc. •Open-access journals: open question! multiple answers! •Some are run purely on donated labor and pass-the-hat hosting. •Others hosted by academic libraries. •Others bootstrap on grants, then transition to something else. •Some charge author-side fees. The more STEMmy, the more likely to charge author-side fees. Waivers are usually available. •Author-side fees are often paid by grants or by “author-fee funds” in libraries or from the employing university.
article open-access on payment of a fee. •Theoretically, they reduce subscription costs relative to adoption of the OA option... but since subscription costs are purely notional anyway, how would anyone know? •Fees here universally higher than fees from pure-OA journals that charge fees at all. Gotta protect profits! (And gotta have anti-OA talking points. “We offered OA, but nobody wanted it! Clearly nobody wants OA!”) •A way to pretend to virtue without being virtuous •A fair few hybrid journals don’t make clear when an article is OA; they’ll even ask for individual download fees still! •And authors are usually still signing over copyright.
of that around. •When first told: apathy. Lots of that, too. •In some cases: wild indignation about author-side fees •In a few precious cases: activism!
of that around. •When first told: apathy. Lots of that, too. •In some cases: wild indignation about library disintermediation •In a few precious cases: activism!
This is a joke, right?” •“It’s hard enough to get faculty to use house style! Those ludicrous librarians seriously think they’ll use repositories?!” •And they were right. Mostly still are. (Exceptions: disciplinary repos in disciplines with long-standing preprint or working-paper cultures.) •INCLUDING IN LIS. I am ashamed of my profession. •Later: “Holy @$%!#@ they’re serious. Let slip the lawyers, lobbyists, and propagandists of war!” •I cannot say this loudly enough: PUBLISHERS ARE NOT OUR FRIENDS. •Nor are we theirs, necessarily. And that’s okay! Where there’s common cause, great. But we must not let them guilt-trip us. Different missions!
•NIH Public Access Policy •Taxpayers are footing the bill, so they should see the research, right? •If you’re NIH-funded, researcher, you are obligated to put a copy of your final manuscript in the NIH’s OA repository, PubMed Central. (Sometimes your publisher will do this for you, sometimes not.) •Common confusion: PMC != PubMed •Harvard faculty self-impose OA mandate •If you’re a Harvard faculty member, you grant Harvard a non- exclusive copyright license to your journal articles, and promise to trot them over to the institutional repository for OA dissemination. •Opt-out available (e.g. if your publisher raises a fuss) •Many imitators, including some academic libraries! (E.g. UWEC.)
not going to stomp on it) •Suffice to say, this is HUGE. •How to reduce a cynical, sarcastic, much-abused ex-IR-manager library-school instructor to tears in the middle of a conference session: THIS. •It’s also dangerous, and not a slam-dunk for OA. •Publishers are trying to claw back control. •Be aware that the US is still a bit behind Europe, Australia. •Though I don’t even know what the UK is thinking. •(Well, I do. “Finch report” hijacked by toll-access publishers.)
•PRISM Coalition •CCC propaganda masquerading as “copyright education” •Lobby government. •Repeatedly! (And we lobby back, of course, cf SPARC.) •Sue. Use the DMCA to combat file-sharing sites. Scare authors. •Pretend to be cooperative with OA. •Hybrid journals •Green-OA policies (which have a remarkable tendency to be tightened or yanked as soon as faculty start taking advantage of them!) •Make accomplishing OA difficult and confusing. •Elsevier is a past master at this. Watch CHORUS carefully; I expect lots of this. •Experiment honestly with OA, increasingly! (And good for them.)
price increase, University of California. Sorry about that recession.” • UC: “You have got to be @#$%& kidding me. No.” •“And if you don’t call off your dogs, our faculty won’t author, review, or edit for you.” •(UC could make this threat because of a long history of activism, by the way. This wouldn’t have been credible from just anybody.) • NPG: “Uh. Okay. Let’s talk about this.” •And the rest is under NDA, apparently. I don’t know the real outcome. But it goes to show, we’re not powerless here! • Successor (2015): the Netherlands vs. Elsevier?
Potsdam, hand over 10% of your TOTAL materials budget for our Big Deal.” •“After all, we accredit chemistry departments! And we have all the best journals, so you’re irresponsible if you don’t!” •Rogers: “You have got to be @#$%& kidding me. No.” •Nota bene: a LOT of faculty education went into this! Sense a theme here? •ACS, (some) Librarians: “How dare you, Rogers?!” •Some days I really do worry about this profession...
•Stable of journals funded by grants, author-side fees •PLoS ONE: original megajournal •Key difference from many journals: if it’s good science, they’ll take it. To heck with asking peer reviewers the “importance” question. This is sometimes called “peer review lite” especially by detractors. •Largest OA publisher; PLoS ONE largest available journal (for now!) •PLoS ONE imitators: several! Nature Communications doing very well. •PeerJ •Pay by the author, not by the article •Ruthless workflow optimizations... but a reputation for phenomenal speed, author service!
is sort of the way that music covers work: compulsory licensing. •Libraries pay in; libraries get access. Rates set by supposedly-neutral third party. (In practice, guess how neutral!) •Canada: Access Copyright •AC: “You want to use stuff in classrooms and not get sued? Pay up.” •Some Canadian libraries: “... okay, sure, take all our money!” •Others: “Subscriptions. Fair dealing. Up yours, AC.” This side won! •US: Copyright Clearance Center •You KNOW they have been watching Canada. •(And issuing copyright propaganda in the guise of “education.” Caveat bibliothecarius!)
website and calling themselves an OA journal publisher? And asking faculty for author-side fees? Nothing. •Typical targets •Graduate students and postdocs who don’t know any better •Faculty in the developing world, because of bad higher-education policy (h/t Richard Poynder) •Subscription publishers and anti-OA faculty/librarians use this phenomenon to tarnish all of OA. •Never mind how many lousy toll-access journals there are! •Prophylactic: DOAJ has instituted quality measures
dollar, 2015ish. •Many Big Deals only available in US dollars •As Big Deals come up for renewal, many Canadian libraries have no choice but to cancel. A lot. •It’s been kind of a slo-mo crash because many Big Deals are multi-year. •Cue consternation! •Don’t get smug, United States. Happening here too! •Less obvious because so many more schools!
•Various problems with peer review •Scammy “publication” outlets •The problem of “authorship” vis-à-vis career credit •Problems associated with diversification of research outputs •The problem of overreliance on poor bibliometric measures for tenuring/promoting scholars •The problems of poor research reproducibility •… all the way on up to actual fraud •Access problems around serials
long, LONG time. •Why? Because the people in control (senior faculty) won under the existing system. •This means they tend to believe it the Best of All Possible Systems; it benefited them, after all! •Plus elitism. These same people believe themselves Top of the Heap. They don’t wanna share with those below! •I expect little to no change in the next few years.
in the form of lab notebooks, it wasn’t feasibly shareable. •Who’s got shelf space?! So notebooks treated as records: keep while needed (e.g. to avoid fraud accusations), then toss. •Now most research data are digital. That changes things! •Major push among research funders for data retention, data sharing, “open science.” •Libraries at research institutions cautiously getting into “data curation” game.
reusers cast as “parasites” •Where will we put it all? (that is, digital preservation) •Different from short-term storage! (But try explaining that to IT.) •What about human-subjects data? •Anonymize all you want… the hackers will still usually win. •Planning hassles, data-preparation hassles, metadata hassles •This is often where librarians can be useful! •(“Standards? What standards?” is still a problem too.) •Data “ownership” a contested concept •Principal investigators think they own and control their data. They’re usually wrong. (The institution usually does, much to PIs’ dismay.) •They also think they have copyright in their data. Sometimes they’re right. Sometimes there is no copyright.
have made training and consulting work. •Caution, though: some have tried but not made this work; it’s not a slam-dunk. •A widespread but usually erroneous belief among researchers that “you can’t help with my data unless you know my discipline” causes a lot of problems here. •Some are serious about long-term storage and preservation. •Lots and lots and LOTS of funder and institutional mandates.
reduce resistance among researchers. •Two current modes: •“Data journals:” like regular journals, but for datasets •Metadata, identifiers (DOIs), and citation standards for datasets: see e.g. DataCite, EZID
A LOT of data. WHOA lots. •What if they made it public? •Barriers •Capacity (these can be low-IT environments) •Some of these data are a revenue source (the smaller the unit governed, the more likely this is). •Privacy issues
data analysis. •That means lots of researchers (and RAs) writing software code. •That means lots of bugs. But if they toss the code, how will anyone know? •As with data, two modes of fixing the problem: •Code journals •Credit for code, which is not as far along as credit for data •Ugly upcoming problem: GitHub •Not a preservation repository! But researchers think it is.
much contention in the next 5-10 years. •“Measuring faculty productivity” will be the main flashpoint. •I also expect a lot more research into (and experimentation with) altmetrics and other ways of measuring research impact. •Also efforts (a la MLA) to redefine what “research” is and what counts as “impact.”
this problem. •Some journals instituting stricter controls to fight plagiarism, lousy statistics •But the current tenure-and-promotion system rewards lousy irreproducible research, so I expect it to be a while before this problem fades.
gets denied access to article. •Reader puts article’s DOI (or other URL) into Sci-Hub. •If LibGen has PDF of article, Sci-Hub delivers it. •If not, Sci-Hub uses university credentials to seek a PDF, which it delivers to reader AND deposits in LibGen. •Where does Sci-Hub get credentials? GOOD QUESTION. •Sci-Hub swears it doesn’t hack or phish for them. •Sci-Hub does NOT swear it doesn’t scoop them up when they’ve been hacked or phished by others. •Sci-Hub claims (some?) credentials are “donated.” •To keep credentialed access from being cut off for excessive downloading, Sci-Hub rotates among credentials it has.
much! •It’s not just less-developed nations or poorer institutions. •Used for convenience as well as access •Is this an indictment of e-resource usability? You bet it is! •Think about what this means for: •E-resource usage stats in libraries (Sci-Hub uses don’t get counted!) •Knock-on effects on library subscriptions •Interlibrary loan/document delivery for the serials literature (Sci-Hub is faster and easier!) •IT security in universities (how many things does your NetID unlock? yeah.)
get some Sci-Hub domains shut down. •Sci-Hub popped up on new domains… and Tor. •Tor: hides who’s using Sci-Hub, so Elsevier et al. will have trouble going after institutions; they have to attack Sci-Hub directly. •It doesn’t take a whole lot of brains to guess that the lawyers won’t win this one.
at the click of a link (or two). •Isn’t that what the open-access movement is looking to accomplish legally? •So it’s not inherently a bad thing! … And sometimes it’s something illegal that spurs real change. •To know about: oadoi.org (API for finding OA copies of something given its DOI; can be incorporated into library link resolvers)
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