Embed Size (px)
Citation preview
It’s All About Access: Issues in Scholarly Communication and Strategies for Change
Ray English, Director of Libraries
Oberlin College
Indiana University of Pennsylvania
March 24, 2007
Scholarly Communication
The system through which research and other scholarly writings are: • created• evaluated for quality• edited• disseminated to the scholarly community• preserved for future use
Scholarly Communication: What’s the Real Issue?
Serials crisis? Cost of journals?Industry consolidation? Publisher monopoly power?Big Deals?Monographs crisis?Permissions crisis?Loss of public domain?Legislative threats to fair use?Preservation of electronic information?Published knowledge growing faster than library
budgets?Publishing system out of sync with new technological
environment?
Fundamental issue is access
Problems are resulting in
loss of access
barriers to access
Access to scholarship by users
Access to publishing opportunities
Problems are systemic
Serials Crisis
Extraordinary price increasesWorst is scientific fieldsWorse for foreign publishersCommercial journals have substantially higher prices and
high profit marginsNo correlation between price and qualityInelastic marketIndustry consolidation, publisher monopoly power
Journal price increases
Currently averaging 8% annually*
Library acquisitions budgets are relatively flat
Ohio libraries increasing at app. 2-3% annually
*Library Journal Periodical Price Survey, April 2006
Serial & Monograph Costs, 1986-2000
North American research libraries
ARL Statistics
Crisis in a nutshell
Average journal prices by broad discipline
Arts and Humanities US $116Non-US $230
Social Sciences US $385Non-US
$716
Sciences US $1,093Non-US $1,866
Library Journal Periodical Price Survey, April 2006
Average prices by specific discipline
Chemistry $3,254Physics 2,850Engineering 1,756Astronomy 1,724Biology 1,548Geology 1,323Math & Computer Sci 1,278Zoology 1,259Botany 1,238Health Sciences 1,132
Library Journal Periodical Price Survey, April 2006
Commercial vs. non-commercial journal prices
Henry Barschall study
Wisconsin and Cornell studies
Ted Bergstrom’s journal pricing page
http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/~tedb/Journals/jpricing.html
Higher priced journals tend to have lesser impact
Higher priced journals tend to be published by commercial firms
Higher quality journals tend to be non-profit, published by societies
Journal Prices by DisciplineJournal Prices by DisciplineBergstrom dataBergstrom data
Ecology 1.01 0.19 0.73 0.05
Economics 0.83 0.17 2.33 0.15
Atmosph. Sci 0.95 0.15 0.88 0.07
Mathematics 0.70 0.27 1.32 0.28
Neuroscience 0.89 0.10 0.23 0.04
Physics 0.63 0.19 0.38 0.05
CostCost per pageper page
Non-profitNon-profit ForFor-profitprofit Non-profitNon-profitFor-profitFor-profit
Cost per citeCost per cite
Bergstrom, Costs and Benefits of Library Site Licenses to Academic Journals, PNAS, 2004
Journal Prices by DisciplineJournal Prices by DisciplineBergstrom dataBergstrom data
Bergstrom, Costs and Benefits of Library Site Licenses to Academic Journals, PNAS, 2004
0
0.5
1
1.5
2
2.5
For-profit Non-profit For-profit Non-profit
Per page Per page Per citation Per citation
EcologyEconomicsAtmosph. SciMathematicsNeurosciencePhysics
Costs of a Complete Economics CollectionCosts of a Complete Economics CollectionBergstrom dataBergstrom data
Publisher Publisher
TypeType
Percent of CostPercent of Cost Percent of CitesPercent of Cites
Non-ProfitNon-Profit 9% 62%
For-ProfitFor-Profit 91% 38%
Journal cost-effectiveness
Ted Bergstrom’s journal cost-effectiveness calculator
http://www.journalprices.com/
What’s going on?
Inelastic marketcoke vs Coke
Publishers have pricing powerAbility to price for profit - at the expense of access
High profit margins
Industry consolidation
Increasing corporate control of journal publishing
Mergers since 1980: • Kluwer: 11 major publishers • Wiley: 9 major publishers• Taylor & Francis: 16 major publishers• Elsevier: 18 major publishers• Thomson: 15 publishers
Migration of non-profit journals to commercial sector
Mergers produce price increasesMcCabe data
Pergamon titles increased 22% after purchase by Elsevier
Lippincott titles increased 35% after purchase by Kluwer
McCabe, ARL Bimonthly Report, Dec. 1999
Global Market Shares of STM Publishers
Reed Elsevier
Thomson
Kluwer
Springer
Wiley
American Chemical Society
Blackwell Publishing
Taylor & Francis
Other
STM Market in 2003: $6 Billion
Scientific Publications: Free for All? UK House of Commons, 2004
Independent industry analyses
UK House of CommonsScience and Technology Committee report (2004)Scientific Publications: Free for All?
European Commission Report (2006)Study on the Economic and Technical Evolution of
Scientific Publication Markets in Europe
Library responses
Request increased budgetsCut subscriptionsReduce monograph purchasesLicense electronic journalsRely on document delivery or ILL
Effective Effective YearYear
Journal Titles Journal Titles
Not RenewedNot Renewed
Dollar cost of Dollar cost of
Titles Not RenewedTitles Not Renewed
1987 843 $160,425
1991 1,417 $263,614
1992 68 $17,944
1993 1,933 $371,734
1996 605 $196,826
2000 1,063 $213,506
2001 274 $41,000
2002 555 $93,542
TotalTotal 6,7586,758 $ 1,358,591$ 1,358,591
Cancellations history at a Research I institution
Electronic journal licenses, Big Deals
Advantage of bundled licenses: Additional access
Disadvantage: Added cost of bundled titles Loss of library choice over content Rates of price increase Length of contracts Threats to subscriptions outside the bundle Continued pressure on monographs budgets
Antitrust issue -- anticompetitive practices
Monographs crisis
University presses under pressure Library markets in declineReduced print runsLimited sales of specialized monographs
Monographs crisis
How are university presses responding to economic pressures?
Publish Bullshit
Reduce specialized monographs
Issue for faculty
Monograph publishing opportunities in decline
MLA Letter from Stephen Greenblatt, 2002
“The Future of Scholarly Publishing” report
New technological environment
Present system derives from the print environment
Networked technologies create new possibilities
Scholarship as a public good
Substantial portion isfunded by taxpayerssupported publicly
created in non-profit sectorJournal literature is freely given away by authors
But journal publishing is largely under corporate controlA public good in private hands
Need for transformative change
Traditional system is unsustainable
Scholars are losing access
System of out of the control of researchers and the academy
Who holds power in the system?Who can create (or impede) change?
PublishersLibrarians, library organizations Faculty
Congress, federal government
Importance of faculty
Faculty have:
Power as editors and editorial board members
Power as originators of research and holders of copyright
Change strategies
Competitive journals
Editorial board control
Declaring Independence
Collective buyingAntitrust actions Open AccessNational policy advocacy
Open access
Most promising strategy to date
Free, unrestricted online access to research literature
Few restrictions on subsequent use
Open access
Two forms:
Open access journals
Author self-archiving - in open archives
Open access journals - gold road
Fully peer reviewed
Full research content openly available on the web
Publication costs covered prior to publication
Lower cost structure
Open access - an access model
Business models vary:
Author fees, from research grants
Subscriptions to non-research content
Advertising
Institutional memberships
Institutional support, subsidies
Related products and services
Endowment
Examples
Public Library of Sciencehttp://www.plos.org/
BioMed Centralhttp://www.biomedcentral.com/
Hindawi Publishinghttp://www.hindawi.com
CERN plan
Directory of Open Access Journalshttp://www.doaj.org/
Open access journals - issues
Funding / business models still evolving
Prestige may be lacking for new titles
Publication fees less workable in some disciplines
Delayed open access may be more feasible in some instances
Author self-archiving - green road
Steven Harnad
Subversive proposal, June 1994
Make scholars' preprints universally available to all scholars via ftp, gopher, and the world wide web
Author self-archiving / open archiving
Author deposits article in an openly accessible repository
Disciplinary repository
Institutional repository
Pre-print, post-print, final published version
Disciplinary repositories
Make intellectual output of a discipline openly accessible
Example:
arXive - for high energy physics
Math, cognitive science, economics, library science, and many other fields
Institutional repositories
Capture the intellectual output of an institution
Examples:DSpace - at MITUniversity of California eScholarship RepositoryOhio Digital Resources Commons
Author self-archiving
High percentage of publishers allow self-archiving
SHERPA ROMEO listing
http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/
Author may exert control over copyright
Authors modifies publisher’s copyright agreement
SPARC author’s addendum
OhioLINK author’s addendum
Value of open access
Increased:
access (instantaneous, worldwide)
readership
research impact
Increased research impact
Studies on research impact:
Eysenbach
Lawrence
Hajjem, Harnad, Gingras - 10 fields
Antelman
Bibliography of studies available at:
http://opcit.eprints.org/oacitation-biblio.html
Value of open access
Fosters scientific progress and growth of knowledge
Progress of open access
Foundation and funding agency support
Welcome Trust mandate
OA to government funded research
UK, US, many other countries
Faculty / university actions
Columbia, Univ. Kansas, many others
Growth of institutional and disciplinary repositoriesGrowth of open access journals
Impact of open access movement
Changed the debate
-- focus is now on access
Widespread acceptance of self-archiving by publishers
Delayed open access -- substantially increased
Hybrid OA journals -- also increasing
Blackwell Author’s Choice, Springer Open Choice,
many others
Importance of campus dialogue and policy development
ACRL / ARL Scholarly Communications Institute
Create Changehttp://www.createchange.org/home.html
ACRL Scholarly Communications Toolkithttp://www.ala.org/ala/acrl/acrlissues/scholarlycomm/
scholarlycommunicationtoolkit/toolkit.htm
Importance of campus dialogue and policy development
Consider:Resolution on open accessInstitutional policy on self-archiving
National policy advocacy
Public access to federally-funded research
NIH policy -- various efforts to strengthen it
Other agencies
Federal Research Public Access Act
Online petition:
http://www.publicaccesstoresearch.org/
Change will be long and difficult
But there are many reasons for optimism: Technology is on the side of change Success of OA and other change strategies Progress at the national level
Scientific publishing reaching level of national policy debate
Faculty engagement Librarian engagement
The Immovable Object
Traditional journal publishing system
Old business models
Copyright and licensing, rights environment
The Irresistible Force
Networked technologies, WebEase of working and playing onlineExpectation that what matters will be online
Open Access
See Paul Courant, “Scholarship and Academic Libraries (and their Kin) in the World of Google,” First Monday, August 2006. http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue11_8/courant/
Courant is betting on the Force
“I think that the force wins; I know that it should.”
Contact information:
Ray English
Director of Libraries, Oberlin College
440-775-8287
Copyright information
Copyright 2006 by Ray English
This work is copyrighted under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 2.5 License.
See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.5/
