School, UW-Madison Open Access Week 2021 Hi, folks, and thanks for inviting me here! I’ll be giving you my somewhat irreverent, very ranty, and not even slightly polite take on the current state of scholarly communication, with special reference to why it costs what it does and how we might be tightwads when it comes to those costs.
crowd with a lot of librarians and some faculty in it; that’s pretty typical of the audience when I give talks like this, which I’ve been doing for fi fteen years or so, one way or another.
career prestige. But the rules around prestige are often outdated or even unethical. Navigating that while not rewarding price-gouging is a tough challenge. {read slide } I publish in the journal literature too, I GET IT. When I’m working with a coauthor who’s up for tenure, they choose the publication venue and I don’t argue. When I can argue, though, I do, because pushing back on the current state of things is a tightwad move and I hope you’ll join me in it at least sometimes.
worked as a librarian doing scholarly-communication stuff for several years too long, sorry. I’ve promised myself this is the LAST TIME I do a talk about it. What I can do today is explain what’s going on, how it’s dysfunctional, how we can survive it anyway, and how we might even change it.
the print era,” here is how the Good Ship Library gets the journal literature to Planet Faculty. (And students, of course, but let’s be real here, faculty mostly drive how the Good Ship Library runs.) The Good Ship Library sends money to publishers, who send journals to Planet Faculty. I am of course making this sound a lot simpler than it is! I want to acknowledge that explicitly because I’ve met a lot of people who actually seem to think it’s this simple. It’s not. If I tell you it is, I’m insulting a lot of hardworking and skilled library folks, which would be wrong of me. So I’m not telling you that . I’m just using this as an approximation, okay?
want you to notice about this setup, though, is that Planet Faculty has no idea how much money is going from the Good Ship Your Library over to the publishing establishment. And I don’t want to just blame faculty here, I am also going to point the fi nger at both the publishers and the Good Ship Your Library on this. These days, publishers write non-disclosure agreements into journal licenses, so prices get kept secret, and straight-up, it was WAY too long before librarians started pushing back on those . This is actually really problematic; ask any economist. Whenever the person who wants the stu ff is di ff erent from the person paying for the stu ff , whenever information about prices is kept secret by NDAs, it’s a recipe for price-gouging.
costs public. Enshrine “no NDAs, no way, no day” in library and institutional policy. So my Tightwad Rule Number One is simple, and aimed straight at libraries . (policy…) And you need written policy on this because anything else is totally unfair to the librarians negotiating licenses. Any salesperson is going to steamroll a librarian who says “I don’t like NDAs.” It’s a lot harder to steamroll an actual written policy. So write one.
to my story here. What happened was, the publishers raised journal prices, as businesses will. And the Good Ship Your Library paid up. Because Planet Faculty needs the journals, right?
can charge whatever we want, at least for our most prestigious and popular journals, and we’ll totally get away with it! So they demanded more money, and more money, and more money, until **CLICK** the outer hull of the Good Ship Your Library just totally blew out. Oh no, red alert, hull breach! Money just pouring endlessly out of the hull!
create it. My father (anthropologist, retired) used to complain to the family about journal cancellations when I was a kid. I’m 50 years old next year. The web is half that age. Now, y’all need to ask older folks like me about journal cost escalation, because there’s this myth out there that The Internet Did It. No, y’all. Nuh-uh. My now-retired anthropologist dad ranted loudly at his family about journal cancellations when I was just a little kid, maybe seven or eight. What he thought we could DO about it I’m not sure, but hey, I grew up to be a scholarly-communications librarian for a while, so maybe it made a di ff erence ? Anyway, I’m hitting the big fi ve-oh next year. The web’s barely half that age. Journal cost escalation long pre-dates the Internet.
did in fact change things: it made the Big Deal possible. In the Big Deal, the Good Ship Your Library still sends money to publishers, and Planet Faculty still has no earthly idea how much, but instead of just one or a few journals, the publisher ships over a big huge wodge of journals . Most of which Planet Faculty doesn’t even want, but y’know, more feels better than fewer, so here we are . Wanna guess what happened next? I bet you can guess what happened next.
this, good for you ! And the Good Ship Your Library searched the couch cushions, which in practical terms means cancelling independent journals that weren’t part of Big Deals, cutting book budgets, cutting capital budgets, even cutting sta ff and services when things got really bad . Because Planet Faculty got hooked on the Big Deal, and the economists tell us that “loss aversion” is a thing. The Good Ship Your Library knew pretty well that if Big Deals went away, Planet Faculty would send the Good Ship to the scrapyard.
wanting to go to the scrapyard and not wanting another hull breach (hull breaches are bad), got together with other good ships to form a whole fl eet of library spaceships to be able to a ff ord Big Deals. These fl eets are called “consortia” and these days every academic library belongs to one or two or fi ve of them . I mean, you’d think the existence of library consortia would be obvious, but it’s the year twenty-twenty-one and I still run into faculty who tell me that libraries should band together to increase our purchasing power like it’s a new idea or something, so yeah.
library spaceship fl eets if you’re a publisher? Well, you just raise prices some more, obviously! It really wasn’t that long before library consortia started springing hull breaches and bleeding money out into the uncaring nothingness of deep space too. And nobody’s been able to repair the breaches, they just keep getting worse.
money) won’t fix it. Now, I’m about to pay o ff this spaceship metaphor, okay? Here is where I pay it o ff . The thing about a hull breach in deep space is, you can’t fi x it or even expect to survive it if all you do is pump more air in. The air you pump in will just bleed out into space some more! That’s not a fi x ! And pumping in more money will not fi x the situation we’re in with journal costs. Price gougers just suck the new money out of libraries and library consortia the same way they did the old money.
That’s the reason I’ve spent fi fteen years thinking and writing and talking about this stu ff . There aren’t any easy fi xes, so we’re still working on the hard ones.
slightly di ff erent way. What is it that publishers are selling when they sell Big Deals ? The easy answer is, “they’re selling journals!” **CLICK** But that answer doesn’t get us anywhere useful. Let’s try again.
BUNDLES,” and that’s closer, it opens up some interesting analogies like cable TV, but again, **CLICK** bundling by itself has not helped us fi x the money-hemorrhaging problem, so let’s move on.
about it. Once journal publishing moved mostly-to-entirely electronic, publishers built walls between their journals and Planet Faculty. These walls are made of copyright, contracts, and NDAs, and that’s all I’m going to say about that — if you want to know more, you have librarians you can talk to ! This isn’t a new idea, of course, most people call these “paywalls” and they’re not wrong.
they sell Big Deals is a hole in their walls. That’s it, that’s all, that’s what they’re selling. Just a hole in the wall . Nice work if you can get it, I guess.
on that isn’t often discussed. Even I have only hinted at it a little bit so far. It’s the sale of academic love — often called prestige — to faculty. I mean, if faculty didn’t need to publish in and review for and edit journals to protect their careers, a whole lot of journals wouldn’t even exist, right? Faculty have lots of claims on their time, many wouldn’t do publishing-related work if they didn’t get something for it, and what they get for it is career advancement. So this is also a kind of sale — just not in money. It’s an exchange of prestige for labor . And the prestige economy of journal publishing interacts with the actual money economy in some fairly unsavory ways. Planet Faculty, for example, will insist that the Good Ship Your Library purchase certain journals not because faculty read them, not because they’re actually any good even, but because faculty PUBLISH in them, or hope to publish in them, or think they lose prestige if the library doesn’t have them . Which means whoever publishes that journal has a huge negotiation advantage over the Good Ship Your Library. Which in turn lets them price-gouge!
Factor to judge individual scholars for tenure and promotion is fl agrantly unethical. It also helps price-gouging wall-builders hold everyone to ransom. Which brings me to Tightwad Rule Number Two. Don’t you LET ME CATCH YOU using Journal Impact Factor in tenure and promotion. It’s fl agrantly unethical. It’s uninclusive, it’s de fi nitionally and mathematically indefensible, it’s just wrong . And for my purposes today, it also feeds the prestige system that helps Big Deal price-gouging wall-builders hold entire fl eets of spaceships to ransom.
lists of Good Journals is just JIF through a back door. Don’t buy this pricey rubbish. Don’t use it. Protest its purchase and use. There’s a corollary to this rule that has to do with all the cute startup toys too many college and university administrators are buying to Measure Faculty Productivity, or Measure Faculty Impact. Days I’m so happy I’m academic sta ff instead of faculty, I couldn’t begin to tell you . Y’all, don’t buy this garbage, especially if it’s relying on lists of Good Journals. Not only is it grossly punitive and once again uninclusive, it’s just Journal Impact Factor through a back door, and it just empowers the price-gougers again. Don’t buy it — hey, I said today was about being a tightwad, right? — don’t use it, and protest its use when you can.
on Research Assessment, which is explicit about dumping Journal Impact Factor out of tenure and promotion practices. Read this. Get all your colleagues to read it. Then get them all to sign it. Because the best time to stop this abusive and unethical use of Journal Impact Factor would have been before it started, but the second-best time is now, today.
wall-builders is amazingly self-defeating. There are plenty of non-price-gouging publications! Donate labor to them instead! Now, back to Planet Faculty. Hey, Planet Faculty! Don’t donate your editing and reviewing labor to price-gouging wall- builders! I’m not saying “never edit, never review.” I’ve edited journals, and I absolutely review for journals. I just review for journals that aren’t run by price-gouging wall-builders, and I happily invite you to do the same . Trust me, I haven’t been in any way scant of reviews to do.
all? {read slide } That’s it. That’s the whole point of Open Access. Who needs these walls, other than wall-builders? Who wants them? What would be di ff erent, what would be better, if we stopped building walls and tore down the walls we have?
current system is galactically lucrative for big wall-builders! Including during the Great Recession and the COVID-19 pandemic! Publishers selling holes in paywalls do not love these questions, to put it mildly. I’ll spare you the details — ask your librarians — but please take my word that the current system of wall-building is galactically lucrative, mostly for the biggest players, and the Great Recession and the pandemic changed that in basically no way at all.
building or maintaining walls, do not uncritically trust what they say about open access. This goes for librarians too! And for university presses and scholarly and professional societies! So Tightwad Rule Number Four is be careful who you listen to about open access, okay? If somebody’s living depends on wall-building and wall maintenance, they’re quite likely to defend walls, I’m just saying ! And it’s not just the usual-suspect huge multinational publishers who act like this. Some librarians do, and is there anything at all as wildly panicky as a university-press director when the university moves toward open access to dissertations? And a WHOLE LOT of scholarly and professional societies whose budgets have gotten fat o ff selling their journals to Big Deal publishers say some things that are just eyebrow-raising . And I’m gonna just lay one thing out there, okay? If you get all your scholarly communication news from the Scholarly Kitchen website, you NEED to expand your information horizons. Scholarly Kitchen was founded by wall-builders, runs o ff wall-builders, and exists basically to defend walls. Gonna need y’all to read some other stu ff , ‘k? Try the Open Access Tracking Project.
out of the scholcomm biz. I’m done. I will never go back. It’s not how I make my living any more. My desire is the librarianly desire for more and better information for more people. Fewer walls.
Okay. The thing about open access is, it’s not a trumpets of Jericho solution — it doesn’t automatically break down all the walls. The walls are still there! There are still walls!
dismantling walls. And they do want us paying for holes in their walls. Or at least… paying for something! How do we break this stalemate in the tightwaddiest ways possible? (paying for something) One of the things we’re seeing the very biggest of the price-gougers do is buy up startups in other areas of research processes, like citation managers and electronic lab notebooks and stu ff like that. The hope is kind of Microsoft-like, I think? Be the One Place Where All Work Gets Done, and then you can charge out the wazoo for it . It de fi nitely makes sense to be concerned about this strategy, but also remember how well it ultimately worked out for Microsoft. I tend to think that research has just too many processes within it to monopolize in that way. But we’ll see . And in the meantime, we have to break the CURRENT stalemate, so how do we DO that without emptying our wallets into the cold abyss between the stars?
non-pro fi t, non-tech-startup, ideally library-run or library-funded repository. Not “your own website,” please. Not ResearchGate or academia.edu or even SSRN. (Stash…) Y’all who have open-access mandates from funders!Using a proper repository almost always ful fi lls the mandate, and it won’t cost a penny out of your grant! Tightwads rejoice ! Now, there are complexities to this, and after fi fteen years of doing these talks I’m absolutely bored senseless with explaining them, so I’m going to refer you to your librarians if you need more information. Hey, information is what librarians do . (Not…) Yeah, yeah, “your own website,” when you retire that’s gone, and it won’t get indexed in Google Scholar anyway . And just MISS ME with these startups, and sites like SSRN that are owned by the Big Deal price-gougers! Just don’t, y’all! Or if you must, both/and it: put a copy wherever you’re going to put it AND put a copy in the local repository, so when the startup folds — and they do fold — you’re covered.
right where you are, from the Good Ship Your Library! Full disclosure, it too is running on a service that got bought out by a Big Deal price-gouger, which is not my favorite thing, but I’m still willing to bet that the Good Ship Your Library will manage to keep your work available openly long after the price-gouger in question is space dust, may that day come swiftly.
more! It directly helps students, policymakers, indie scholars, and others. Bigger picture: open access (in all forms) ultimately reduces what wall-builders can charge for holes in their walls. Without getting laughed at, anyway. And because I don’t pretend everybody here is in this thing for the pure altruism, let me point out that posting your work to the repository improves your Googlejuice and stands a good chance of getting you cited more. True story, my fi rst published journal article had been cited FOUR TIMES by the time it actually appeared in print, because I posted the preprint to my local repository. And doing this also, y’know, helps people, which is not a bad thing . In the bigger picture, open access in any form ultimately reduces the amount of material that’s walled o ff , which in turn reduces the value of holes in walls, which if we’re really lucky might help us plug the hull breaches in the Good Ship Your Library.
a thing that I have NOT SAID TODAY is that publishing costs nothing. Y’all, just MISS ME with that. I used to be a typesetter and a format-conversion practitioner and I’m currently a digital preservation expert. I assure you that “publishing is free!” is some kind of garbage and I do not want to hear it . But we don’t have to pay for walls, is the thing. We can just pay for the actual work of editing and typesetting and conversion and website maintenance and proper metadata and indexing and information security and digital preservation and all that. The walls aren’t necessary, even though the other work is.
idea shows up as what are called author-side fees or article- processing charges. Which, as a lot of folks have noticed, can be nosebleed high . It probably won’t surprise you that there’s a strong direct correlation between journals whose publishers are price- gouging wall-builders and journals with nosebleed-high author-side fees. So buyer beware, because…
Planet Faculty starts depending on paying author-side fees because that’s the only way to get academic love just opens the door yet again to price-gouging ! Faculty need to publish; not publishing is not an option, it’s a bit of a captive market. So letting the price-gougers own this game is just going to **CLICK** make Planet Faculty itself blow up.
negotiate them, and see if somebody else will pay them. I mean, it’s just common sense, really. Tightwad Rule Number Six is that if you’re staring at author-side fees, try negotiating them — worst they can say is “no,” right? — and also see if your funder or your department or a fund at the institution will pay them. Just common sense . I don’t hold with the idea that faculty should never have to worry about costs, though. Faculty SHOULD have to worry about costs, because faculty NOT worrying about costs is how the Good Ship Your Library blew a hole in its hull in the fi rst place.
walls got started — gosh, coming up on a decade ago it must be by now, from university libraries in the Netherlands. It got picked up by Germany in an absolutely epic saga spanning three or four years, and on this side of the pond California and a few other places have been pioneering it . And this approach is commonly known as “transformative agreements” or “read-and-publish” agreements, and the way they work is, along with paying for the usual hole in the paywall, the Good Ship Your Library pays for a certain quantity of, or price for, open access for articles published by your institution’s faculty . And again, I’m glossing over A LOT of detail here, these negotiations are really complicated and really fraught. But that’s the basic idea.
so? Maybe. I encourage all of us to see them for what they are: stalemate-breakers. You may not love these deals… but it’s still on all of us to fi nd ways to break the stalemate and move on from it. There’s a lot of criticism of these deals out there, and I’m not gonna lie, a lot of it is warranted. The inclusion and equity issues around them are real and they’re serious and they may even be inherent in the model, though honestly I don’t think they have to be . But the status quo is not an acceptable alternative here. We can’t go back to hull breaches! So I encourage thinking about these deals as stalemate-breakers — a chance to negotiate about something that isn’t just price, something that actually breaks down walls . Maybe that still doesn’t make you warm to these deals, AND THAT’S FINE, but in that case I need you to be thinking about how YOU are going to help break this stalemate, because it’s gotta be broken somehow.
are in a tense negotiation or stalemate, support your library. Often. Loudly. In public. Your library can’t say “no” and stick to it without institutional backing. A library that can’t say “no” and stick to it can’t get a good deal. Negotiation 101! Tightwad Rule Number Seven: if there’s a Big Deal license or a transformative agreement or anything like that under negotiation, you NEED to SUPPORT the Good Ship Your LIBRARY, often and loudly and in public. Even if you DISAGREE with how the negotiation is going! Disagree in private, support in public . And the reason for this is Negotiation 101. If the Good Ship Your Library can’t walk away from a deal because Planet Faculty is hassling them, that’s a recipe for more price-gouging. The price-gouger has the library over a barrel and they know it. And the Good Ship Your Library can’t walk away from deals if Planet Faculty undercuts them in public. So don’t DO that.
I just also want to point out the possibility of consciously and deliberately reallocating money to publications and publishers that don’t put up walls.
I’ve done unpaid advising work for these folks — is the Open Library of the Humanities. Check them out, they’re amazing and they publish really excellent stu ff , and they’re making it work without building walls. It CAN be done ! When the money is there. I really want to see the Good Ship Your Library ensure that the money is there. Two percent solution, however you want to play it, but if open access is anything more than lip service to you, put your money where your mouth is.
me to the third option for dealing with hull breaches: stop paying for walled-o ff stu ff . And in a way this is nothing new? Like I said, journal cancellations are half a century old if they’re a day.
Big-Deal-related tends to do. Partly out of necessity, partly out of wanting to break the stalemate, though, we’re seeing more and more libraries and consortia busting up and working around Big Deals, and explaining how they did it so others can do it too . SPARC, which is an initiative of the Association of Research Libraries, is keeping a public list of these, and there’s a growing journal-article and case-study literature on how to do it. So if you’re curious, check out SPARC and as always, talk to a librarian.
Deals must have a communication plan. One that starts months, if not years, before cancellation. If not, the wall-builders can and will incite faculty to devour the library alive. But the most fundamental advice for doing this is so important that I’m turning it into Tightwad Rule Number Eight: communicate, communicate, communicate ! The Good Ship Your Library absolutely cannot, should not, and must not spring a major cancellation on everybody suddenly. They have to explain what’s going on and why . We’ve seen what can happen if they don’t, there’s plenty of horror stories here — if Planet Faculty doesn’t start an insurrection all by itself, which it often does, the wall-builders go behind the library’s back to Planet Faculty to foment that insurrection. The only way to cut that o ff is to communicate early and often. We KNOW this by now.
get taken in by the wall-builders, what is wrong with y’all? **CLICK** Don’t you let me catch you blaming your library for this mess. Blame the vendors, blame the vendors, blame the vendors. That’s the only viable road to fi xing the hull breaches.
folks at the Good Ship Your Library. Don’t talk AT or OVER them, talk WITH them. There’s a difference. We need all hands on deck to fi x the hull breaches. Last Tightwad Rule before I sum up: Talk to the good folks at the Good Ship Your Library about all this . Citizens of Planet Faculty! Some of you are probably feeling kind of attacked right now! I will not say that you are wrong to feel that way ! I will say, though, that the fl ak I’ve thrown at y’all today is NOTHING compared to the erasure, insults, condescension, and abuse that librarians routinely — ROUTINELY — hear from faculty, never mind wall-builders. It’s not okay, it will never BE okay, and it needs to stop. And I am saying this to you in the very confrontational way I am saying it because I’m an outsider — **CLICK** in our little planets-and-spaceships scenario here I’m a bug-eyed alien — so I CAN be confrontational. Planet Faculty can’t hurt me the way it can and does routinely hurt librarians . Do not talk AT your librarians. Especially don’t talk OVER them. Talk WITH them, please. We really need all hands on deck to fi x these hull breaches.
Rule 2: Do not use Journal Impact Factor to judge individual scholars for tenure and promotion. ✦ Rule 2a: Don’t buy “researcher productivity” tools that rely on lists of Good Journals. ✦ Rule 3: Donate labor only to publishers who are not price-gouging wall-builders. So. Summing up.
living off building or maintaining walls, do not uncritically trust what they say about open access. ✦ Rule 5: Stash your OA pre/postprints in a non-pro fi t, non-tech-startup, ideally library-run or library-funded repository. ✦ Rule 6: If you’re staring at author-side fees, negotiate them and see if somebody else will pay them.
a wall-builder are in a tense negotiation or stalemate, support your library. ✦ Rule 8: A library planning to trash Big Deals must have a communication plan. ✦ Rule 9: TALK WITH LIBRARIANS ABOUT ALL THIS.
by Dorothea Salo. It is available under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. All non-screenshot art from OpenClipArt.org. Support OpenClipArt! I have.
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