[GOAL] Re: [sparc-oaforum] Re: Cancelling because contents are Green OA vs. because publisher allows Green OA -- A practical evaluation of library workflow

[Rick Anderson]

Ellen, the very detailed and time-intensive process you outline below is one that would arguably be necessary in order to perform an ongoing, comprehensive analysis of article availability under a Green OA regime, but I think it's much more than would be necessary in order to make reasonable cancellation decisions in many cases. As I said before, the criteria we use to make subscription and cancellation decisions are multidimensional and each criterion is on a continuum — but each one's position on every continuum doesn't always have to be carefully analyzed in order to make good decisions.

So, for example: if I learn that Biology Journal X has gone Green with a 12-month embargo, I can forward that information to our collection development manager. He can look up the title and see that we have a freestanding subscription and that it costs $2000/year. Because is familiar with both our budget situation and our institution's curricular focus, he can then make a quick decision: is $2000 a high-enough price to justify putting Biology Journal X on a "to be reviewed" list, given the centrality (or lack thereof) of that journal to our institutional needs? If so, then it goes on the list and our serials review team will be prompted to look at it later on (one year later, two years later, whatever). The review could consist of sampling several issues from the period under review and searching their contents to see what percentage of the articles are publicly available. This would be kind of drudgey work, but we have people who can do it at a low cost during down times at service desks.

The cheaper and more locally-relevant the journal, the less likely we would be to undertake this kind of review (and the less likely we'd be to cancel it as a result). The more expensive and more peripheral the journal, and the higher the percentage of publicly-available articles in it, the more likely would be review and cancellation.

All of the above applies only to newly-Green journals going forward, of course. Reviewing the current field of Green journals for likely cancellation candidates is a more daunting task — one that I'm scheduled to discuss with my CD staff today. But I'm pretty confident that we'll be able to come up with an approach that will return good value for cost. And if we can't, then we won't do it.

---
Rick Anderson
Assoc. Dean for Scholarly Resources & Collections
Marriott Library, University of Utah
Desk: (801) 587-9989
Cell: (801) 721-1687
rick.anderson at utah.edu

From: Ellen Finnie Duranceau <efinnie at MIT.EDU<mailto:efinnie at MIT.EDU>>
Date: Tuesday, September 17, 2013 8:30 AM
To: "Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)" <goal at eprints.org<mailto:goal at eprints.org>>, Stevan Harnad <amsciforum at gmail.com<mailto:amsciforum at gmail.com>>
Cc: "Friend, Fred" <f.friend at ucl.ac.uk<mailto:f.friend at ucl.ac.uk>>, LibLicense-L Discussion Forum <LIBLICENSE-L at listserv.crl.edu<mailto:LIBLICENSE-L at listserv.crl.edu>>, SPARC Open Access Forum <SPARC-OAForum at arl.org<mailto:SPARC-OAForum at arl.org>>, Rick Anderson <rick.anderson at utah.edu<mailto:rick.anderson at utah.edu>>
Subject: RE: [GOAL] Re: [sparc-oaforum] Re: Cancelling because contents are Green OA vs. because publisher allows Green OA -- A practical evaluation of library workflow

With this debate underway, I’ve been trying to picture a reasonable workflow that would assess the rate of immediate green OA via publisher’s self-archiving policy and use it effectively in a collections process.   I have been unable to come up with any scenario that seems solid enough to even experiment with, let alone deploy, in a research library.

For this exercise, I’m leaving aside any broader goals of wider distribution of publicly funded research, etc., or any philosophical factors, and am just focusing on providing sufficient service to one’s own community.

First, we have the problem that a wide sampling from any given journal would be required, since author practices in self-archiving vary.    This sampling would also have to be repeated regularly, and take in several sample years, since practices will vary over time.

Whoever performs this sampling would also have to be trained in recognizing the version of articles, since presumably one wants the peer-reviewed version available to one’s faculty and researchers and students.  This would require, in many cases, comparing the manuscript with the version of record (which, please note, is only available to you if you subscribe).

After all the sampling is done and a spreadsheet created, one would then have to calculate what percentage of the journal was openly available (and whether that percentage was acceptable – this would have to be a very high number, presumably), and after what time period. This would not be an easy feat, as one has to have numbers representing the total number of articles  in order to make the comparison, and as far as I’m aware, this would involve manually tabulating the number of articles in each issue (again possibly through sampling).   Then this information would have to be used in conjunction with other important data such as usage level, faculty interest and feedback, cost, etc.  (Let’s leave aside for the moment that this whole approach would only be responsible if one had buy-in from the community one is serving.)

If the decision were taken to cancel the journal, assuming here that the decision rested in part on the availability of OA manuscripts, then one would also have to have a cycle of returning to those titles to be sure a certain acceptable percentage was still available.   This would be necessary because author practices vary and there is no reason at all to assume that because for one year, a good percentage of a journal was OA, that will be true the next year.  So perhaps a continuous sampling would be required.  We are now talking about a dramatic impact on staff resources, so some other work would need to be stopped or slowed.

Then, if one wants to continue to sample post cancellation, as would seem to be necessary, in many cases one would need the version of record to compare with, to be sure one is looking at the peer-reviewed version. Yet this version would not be available once the cancellation had taken place.  So staff would be operating without solid information in future sampling, as it can be difficult to tell a preprint from a postprint without the version of record as a comparison point.

Now we add in the practical reality that if any number of libraries followed this labor-intensive workflow and reassigned staff from other tasks to do it, within a year or two, the publishers would simply change their green OA policy for authors, removing it entirely or adding an embargo.

So then the library has the problem of having to track these publisher policy changes --- that in itself would require a labor-intensive workflow I won’t try to lay out, as there is no reliable and targeted signaling process for such changes—and then resubscribe.   That could be tricky, as possibly the necessary funds would have already been diverted.  Even if funds were available, it would be exceedingly labor intensive to resubscribe and decide about and act upon filling any gaps in access, which could create confusion if left as gaps, as well as updating relevant metadata so useful services like SFX linking.    Perhaps one would fill the gaps/restore the access via pay-per-view, but now we are talking about having to do another analysis about whether that is cost-effective.

(Let’s also recall that while the journals were cancelled, SFX buttons weren’t taking users from finding resources like Compendex, Inspec, Web of Knowledge, etc. to journal articles.  Known article searches may have been functioning, but index-based searching that links to the actual documents to assist those new to a topic area would have been limited to subscribed titles.)

When looking at how to operate in this evolving ecosystem, I imagine we all agree it’s important to use funds and staff resources wisely, and to look beyond a quarter or a year in thinking about the impacts of decisions.   Without considering any philosophical or social goals (no matter how mission-relevant, or noble), and looking just at the practical need of providing key research articles to a community, I do not see a viable workflow that seems worth testing even on a trial basis.

This is probably part of the reason you do not hear about libraries cancelling journals based on availability of OA manuscripts.  I would also guess that if the numbers were run, there would not be any journals to cancel,  as author practices in this area are not consistent.


Ellen Duranceau



__________________

Ellen Finnie Duranceau
Program Manager, Scholarly Publishing and Licensing
MIT Libraries
P 617 253 8483
efinnie at mit.edu<mailto:efinnie at mit.edu>
http://libraries.mit.edu/scholarly

From: goal-bounces at eprints.org<mailto:goal-bounces at eprints.org> [mailto:goal-bounces at eprints.org] On Behalf Of Heather Morrison
Sent: Monday, September 16, 2013 5:13 PM
To: Stevan Harnad
Cc: Friend, Fred; LibLicense-L Discussion Forum; SPARC Open Access Forum; Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci); Rick Anderson
Subject: [GOAL] Re: [sparc-oaforum] Re: Cancelling because contents are Green OA vs. because publisher allows Green OA

Librarians are a much more collaborative profession than most, but librarians do not all share the same opinions or work in the same environments.

At most academic libraries, librarians do not have the ability to unilaterally cancel journals. If librarians did have this power, some of the "big deal" publishers might have disappeared a long time ago. Physics journals have not experienced cancellations in spite of near 100% self-archiving in arXiv because physicists value their journals and will not allow their libraries to cancel.

Rick Anderson's approach to actively seek OA material in order to cancel is unique, in my opinion. Even other librarians with a similar philosophy are unlikely to undertake the work to figure out what percentage is free, or risk the wrath of faculty members who value their journals and/or do not wish to do the extra work of searching in repositories.

It would be interesting to see how much money Rick's library would save, and compare this with how much they could save by cancelling a single big deal with a high-cost publisher.

best,

Heather Morrison



On 2013-09-16, at 5:06 PM, Stevan Harnad <amsciforum at gmail.com<mailto:amsciforum at gmail.com>>
 wrote:


The library community has to make up its own mind whether it is OA's friend or foe.

(1) Cancelling journals when all or most of their contents have become Green OA is rational and constructive -- but we're nowhere near there; and whether and when we get there is partly contingent on (2):

(2) Cancelling (or even announcing the intention to cancel) journals because they allow Green OA is irrational, extremely short-sighted, and extremely destructive (to OA) as well as self-destructive (to libraries).

But I already have enough to do trying to get institutions and funders to adopt rational and constructive OA mandates that researchers can and will comply with.

If libraries are not allies in this, so be it; we already have publishers whose interests conflict with those of OA. If it's to be the same with libraries, it's better we know it sooner rather than later.

I suspect, however, that there might be a portion of the library community that would be strongly opposed to cancelling journals because they are Green, and precisely for the reasons I have mentioned.

Stevan Harnad

On Mon, Sep 16, 2013 at 4:05 PM, Rick Anderson <rick.anderson at utah.edu<mailto:rick.anderson at utah.edu>> wrote:


  Is it possible that what you really intend to do is suggest that just because a publisher allows all articles to be archived Green doesn't mean that the articles are actually available that way, and that it might be dangerous for a library to cancel in a knee-jerk way when a publisher makes that allowance?
Yes.

See how easy that was? Here's how I would respond to that suggestion:

Yes, you raise a valid point. Just because a publisher allows complete and unembargoed Green OA archiving of a journal doesn't mean that all of the journal's content will end up being archived. So I would adjust the categorical statement I made in my original posting thus: "My library will cancel our subscriptions to any such journal, once we have determined that a sufficient percentage of its content is being made publicly available promptly and at no charge — promptness being assessed on a sliding scale relative to the journal's relevance to our needs."

Obviously, this will be relatively easy to do for new Green journals or for journals that make the shift in the future. As for existing Green-without-embargo journals, I'm currently discussing with my collection development staff how we might cost-effectively review the list of Green-without-embargo journal publishers found at http://bit.ly/1aOetHB and see which of their journals we currently subscribe to, and which of these we might be able to cancel. This would be a relatively time-intensive project, but we have students working at service desks in my library who could probably help.



If you see a problem with the explanation I laid out, please say what the problem is

I did (and you've just repeated part of what I said above..

Here it is again:

1. 60% of journals are Green

2. No evidence that more articles from Green journals are made Green OA than articles from non-Green journals

3. Cancelling (needed) journals because they are Green rather than because they are accessible or unaffordable is arbitrary and counterproductive (for user needs).

4. Cancelling journals because they are Green rather than because they are either unneeded or unaffordable is arbitrary and counterproductive for OA.

Depending on what our goals are, reality can sometimes be counterproductive. It's a reality that a subscription is less needed when the content of the journal in question is freely available online. (It matters, of course, what percentage of the content really becomes available that way, and how quickly it will become available. But the more its content is free and the faster it gets that way, the less incentive there is for anyone, including libraries, to pay for access to it. And the tighter a library's budget, the more sensitive its cancellation response will be to the Green-without-embargo signal.)


5. Publicly announcing (as you did) that journals are to be cancelled because they are Green rather than because they are either unneeded or unaffordable is certain to induce Green publishers to stop being Green and instead adopt and Green OA embargoes.

Discussing reality may not always help to advance an OA agenda (or any other agenda, for that matter), but eventually reality will always win. Scolding people for talking about reality is ultimately much more counterproductive than figuring out how to deal with it.


6. Library cancellation of Green journals will slow the growth of OA, thereby compounding the disservice that such an unthinking (sic) policy does both to users and to OA.

It doesn't seem to me that OA is something to which we owe allegiance. It seems to me that our goal should be a healthy, vital, and sustainable scholarly communication environment that brings the maximum possible benefit to the world.  Deciding up front that OA is the only road to such an environment has two seriously debilitating effects: first, it makes the questioning of OA, or even of specific OA strategies, into a thoughtcrime (as we've seen here today), and second, it precludes the consideration of other, possibly promising options.

Why on earth would scholars look to those that can't or won't discuss these issues in a rational, reasonably objective way for guidance on how to conduct their own scholarly communication?

---
Rick Anderson
Assoc. Dean for Scholarly Resources & Collections
Marriott Library, University of Utah
Desk: (801) 587-9989<tel:%28801%29%20587-9989>
Cell: (801) 721-1687<tel:%28801%29%20721-1687>
rick.anderson at utah.edu<mailto:rick.anderson at utah.edu>


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