[GOAL] Re: 20 years of cowardice: the pathetic response of American universities to the crisis in scholarly publishing

Tue May 1 17:34:09 BST 2012

Steve-

I'm not sure what you're taking with. I agree that universities should take
control of their own scholarly content. But are you trying to argue that
they have done this? Because I don't view setting up an IR to hold material
published in subscription journals as taking ownership of the process -
rather it's attempting to have it both ways without actually challenging
the system in any meaningful way.

-Mike

On Tue, May 1, 2012 at 9:06 AM, Steve Hitchcock <sh94r at ecs.soton.ac.uk>wrote:

> A perspective spanning 20 years on this topic that fails to mention
> repositories hardly begins to tackle the issues or the problems.
>
> If we go back 20 years to 1992 we had arXiv, a repository, but barely any
> e-journals (although most e-journals then were free).
>
> Some journals that followed were called 'overlay' journals, because they
> effectively overlaid peer review on top of arXiv. The problems they solved
> were:
>
> 1 access to peer reviewed electronic content (when there were few peer
> reviewed journals available electronically)
> 2 low costs for peer reviewed content
>
> These original overlay journals were so successful they later became
> subscription journals (mainly because they also began to overlay
> conventional journal production costs on top of peer review). There were
> few imitators subsequently because the two problems were effectively solved
> c. 2000 by the mass switch to electronic journals, and the emergence of IRs
> and green OA journals.
>
> This polemic is trying to solve the same problems, but the solutions from
> the last 20 years are still in place, and it ignores them.
>
> The response of many universities has been pathetic, but not for the
> reasons suggested, and if the problem being addressed is costs rather than
> access, then the proposals here, to forcibly switch journals to gold OA,
> risks making the access problem worse and raising total costs higher than
> is achievable with IRs. It is not enough simply to talk with publishers
> about reallocation of charges.
>
> Instead institutions should be investing in and promoting local published
> content, ensuring it is made open access to the world locally; also making
> the inevitable connection between institutional repositories and research
> data linked to publications, before that too becomes subject to outside
> control and cost escalation.
>
> We can agree that we don't want it to take 15 more years for open access
> to become the norm.
>
> Steve Hitchcock
> WAIS Group, Building 32
> School of Electronics and Computer Science
> University of Southampton, SO17 1BJ, UK
> Email: sh94r at ecs.soton.ac.uk
> Twitter: http://twitter.com/stevehit
> Connotea: http://www.connotea.org/user/stevehit
> Tel: +44 (0)23 8059 9379    Fax: +44 (0)23 8059 9379
>
> On 1 May 2012, at 15:30, Michael Eisen wrote:
>
> > from my blog: http://www.michaeleisen.org/blog/?p=1058
> > 20 years of cowardice: the pathetic response of American universities to
> the crisis in scholarly publishing
> > By Michael Eisen | May 1, 2012
> > When Harvard University says it can not afford something, people notice.
> So it was last month when a faculty committee examining the future of the
> university’s libraries declared that the continued growth of journal
> subscription fees was unsustainable, even for them. The accompanying calls
> for faculty action are being hailed as a major challenge to the traditional
> publishers of scholarly journals.
> >
> > Would that it were so. Rather than being a watershed event in the
> movement to reform scholarly publishing, the tepidness of the committee’s
> recommendations, and the silence of the university’s administration, are
> just the latest manifestation of the toothless response of American
> universities to the “serials crisis” that has plagued libraries for decades.
> >
> > Had the leaders major research universities attacked this issue head on
> when the deep economic flaws in system became apparent, or if they’d showed
> even an ounce of spine in the ensuing twenty or so years, the
> subscription-based model that is the root of the problem would have long
> ago been eliminated. The solutions have always been clear. Universities
> should have stopped paying for subscriptions, forcing publishers to adopt
> alternative economic models. And they should have started to reshape the
> criteria for hiring, promotion and tenure, so that current and aspiring
> faculty did not feel compelled to publish in journals that were bankrupting
> the system. But they did neither, choosing instead to let the problem
> fester. And even as cries from the library community intensify, our
> universities continue to shovel billions of dollars a year to publishers
> while they repeatedly fail to take the simple steps that could fix the
> problem overnight.
> >
> > The roots of the serials crisis
> >
> > Virtually all of the problems in scholarly publishing stem from the
> simple act, repeated millions of times a year, of a scholar signing over
> copyright in their work to the journal in which their work is to appear.
> When they do this they hand publishers a weapon that enables them to
> extract almost unlimited amounts of money from libraries at the same
> research institutions that produced the work in the first place.
> >
> > The problem arises because research libraries are charged with obtaining
> for scholars at their institution access to the entire scholarly output of
> their colleagues. Not just the most important stuff. Not just the most
> interesting stuff. Not just the most affordable stuff. ALL OF IT. And
> publishers know this. So they raise prices on their existing journals. And
> they launch new titles. And then they raise their prices.
> >
> > What can libraries do? They have to subscribe to these journals. Their
> clientele wants them – indeed, they need them to do their work. They can’t
> cancel their subscription to Journal X in favor of the cheaper Journal Y,
> because the contents of X are only available in X. Every publisher is a
> monopoly selling an essential commodity. No wonder things have gotten out
> of control.
> >
> > And out of control they are. Expenditures on scholarly journals at
> American research libraries quadrupled from 1986 to 2005, increasing at
> over three times the rate of inflation. This despite a massive reduction in
> costs due to a major shift towards electronic dissemination. These rates of
> growth continue nearly unabated, even in a terrible economy. (For those
> interested in more details, I point you to SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing
> and Academic Resources Coalition, who tracks journal pricing and revenues).
> >
> > The opportunity universities missed
> >
> > Just as the serials crisis was hitting its stride in the mid-1990′s,
> fate handed universities an out – the internet. In the early 1990′s access
> to the scholarly literature almost always occurred via print journals. By
> the end of the decade, virtually all scholarly journals were publishing
> online.
> >
> > This radical transformation in how scholarly works were disseminated
> should have been accompanied by a corresponding radical shift in the
> economics of journal publishing. But it barely made a dent. Publishers, who
> were now primarily shipping electrons instead of ink on paper, kept raising
> their subscription prices as if nothing had happened. And universities let
> them get away with it.
> >
> > By failing to show even a hint of creativity or initiative in seizing
> the opportunity presented by the internet to reshape the system of
> scholarly communication in a productive way, the leaders of American
> universities condemned themselves to 15 more years (and counting) of rising
> costs, and decreasing value. Their inaction also cost them the chance to
> reclaim the primary role they once held (through their university presses)
> in communicating the output of their scholars.
> >
> > But while universities did next to nothing to fix scholarly publishing,
> others leapt into the fray. A new economic model, which came to be known as
> “open access“, emerged as an alternative to the subscription journals.
> Under open access the costs of publishing would be bourn up front by
> research sponsors, with the finished product freely available to all. In
> addition to the obvious good greatly expanding the reach of the scholarly
> literature, open access was largely free of the economic inefficiencies
> that created the serials crisis in the first place, and enjoyed very strong
> support from university libraries across the country. But despite its
> manifold advantages, universities as a whole did little to help it succeed.
> >
> > The unholy alliance between journals and universities
> >
> > The biggest obstacle to the rise of open access journals was (and to a
> large extent still is) the major role that journal titles play in how
> universities evaluate candidates for jobs and promotions. In most academic
> disciplines, careers are built by publishing papers in prestigious journals
> – those that are the most selective, and therefore have the most cache.
> Scholars rising through the ranks of graduate school, the job market,
> assistant professorships and tenure face a nearly contant barrage of
> messages telling them that they have to publish in the best journals if
> they want to succeed at the next step. Never mind that it is far less true
> than people believe. That people believe it is all that matters.
> >
> > Almost everyone I know thinks that simply looking at journal titles is a
> stupid way to decide who is or is not a good researcher, and yet it
> remains. There are many reasons why this system persists, but the most
> important is that universities like it. Administrators love having
> something like an objective standard that can be applied to all of the
> candidates for a job, promotion, etc… that might allow them to compare not
> only candidates for one job to each other, but all candidates for any honor
> across the university. This is perhaps why no university that I know of has
> taken a forceful stand against the use of journal titles as a major factor
> in hiring and promotion decisions. And it is, I believe, a major reason why
> they are unwilling to cut off the flow of money to these journals.
> >
> > It’s never too late
> >
> > Although their record is pretty bad, universities could still play a
> major role in making scholarly publishing work better – and save themselves
> money in the process – with two simple actions:
> >
> >       • Stop the flow of money to subscription journals. Universities
> should not renew ANY subscriptions. They should, instead, approach them
> with a new deal – they’ll maintain payments at current levels for 3 more
> years if the journal(s) commit to being fully open access at the end of
> that time.
> >       • Introduce – and heavily promote – new criteria for hiring and
> promotion that actively discourage the use of journal titles in evaluating
> candidates.
> > These ideas are not new. Indeed, the basic outlines appear in a
> fantastic essay from the Association of Research Librarians published in
> March 1998, describing the serials crisis and their solutions to fix it:
> >
> > The question inevitably asked is, “Who goes first?” Which major
> universities and which scholarly societies have the will, confidence, and
> financial resources to get the process started?
> >
> > Our answer is simple and to the point. It is time for the presidents of
> the nation’s major research universities to fish or cut bait. Collectively,
> they have both opportunity and motive—and, in the Association of American
> Universities, they have an organization with the capacity to convene the
> necessary negotiations.
> >
> > It’s amazing that essentially noboby took them up on the challenge the
> first time. Let’s hope it doesn’t take  another 15 years.
> >
> >
> >
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-- 
Michael Eisen, Ph.D.
Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute
Associate Professor, Department of Molecular and Cell Biology
University of California, Berkeley
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