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Serials Spoken Here
Reports of Conferences, Institutes, and Seminars
Andrée J. Rathemacher, Amanda N. Price, Laurel I. Sammonds,Connie Foster and Sarah Glasser, Contributors
Kurt Blythe, Column Editor
The Scholarly Communication Interest Group of the New England Chapter of the Association ofCollege and Research Libraries sponsored a workshop titled “Partnering with Faculty: ScholarlyCommunication Conversations,” held on July 29, 2010, at the Franklin W. Olin College ofEngineering in Needham, Massachusetts. Partnering with EBSCO and the North American SerialsInterest Group, Mississippi State University (MSU) Libraries hosted the ninth MidSouth eResourceSymposium at MSU's Mitchell Memorial Library in Starkville, Mississippi, on Thursday, September16, 2010. ITHAKA Sustainable Scholarship was a two-day meeting at the Westin Times Square, NewYork City, September 27–28, 2010. Finally, published herein is a summary of the NISO Webinar “It'sOnly as Good as the Metadata: Improving OpenURL and Knowledge Base Quality,” held October 13,2010. Serials Review 2011; 37:47–60.
Partnering with Faculty: Scholarly CommunicationConversations
Andrée J. Rathemacher
Note: Conference proceedings are available for download fromthe Web site.1
This report covers a workshop held by the Scholarly Commu-nications Interest Group of the Association of College and ResearchLibraries, New England Chapter (ACRL/NEC), an independentchapter of ACRL. The mission of the ACRL/NEC Scholarly Commu-nication Interest Group is to “develop and nurture a regionalcommunity of academic professionals interested in forwardingscholarly communication interests in higher education.” The groupprovides “a forum for sharing ideas about a wide variety of topics,including institutional repositories, authors' rights, and openaccess and other alternative publishing models.”2 The workshop,titled “Partnering with Faculty: Scholarly Communication Con-
versations,” was held on July 29, 2010, at the Franklin W. OlinCollege of Engineering in Needham, Massachusetts.
Methods and Messages That Work
Theworkshop featured a keynote address by Peter Suber, BerkmanFellow at Harvard University, senior researcher at SPARC, andOpen Access Project director at Public Knowledge. In his address“Methods and Messages that Work,” Suber asserted that manda-tory archiving policies instituted by universities and fundingagencies are significant agents of change in scholarly communica-tions today. However, in order to make these policies work, facultyand researchers need to be persuaded to comply.
Suber began with an overview of open-access literature andhow it is delivered. Open access (OA) literature is digital, online,free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restric-tions. OA literature can be delivered through institutional ordisciplinary repositories, in which are deposited preprints orpostprints of articles published elsewhere. There is no local peerreview associated with repositories although the material depos-ited has often been peer reviewed elsewhere. Access to OAliterature through institutional or disciplinary repositories isknown as “green” OA. “Gold” OA, on the other hand, is a termused for journals that are open access, whether by birth or throughconversion to an open access model. Peer review, when used, ispart of the publishing process of OA journals. Journals can beconsidered “gold” OA regardless of their business model (whetheror not they charge author fees). OA scholarship can also bedelivered through personalWeb sites, blogs, wikis, databases,Webcasts, and other technologies.
After this introduction, Suber stated that his presentationwouldfocus on institutional repositories and how to communicate withfaculty about OA policies in a way that will allay their fears about
Rathemacher is Head, Acquisitions, University Libraries, University of RhodeIsland, Kingston, RI 02881-2011, USA; e-mail: [email protected] is Coordinator of Serials, Mitchell Memorial Library, Mississippi State University,Mississippi State, MS 39762, USA; e-mail: [email protected] is Coordinator of Collection Development, Mitchell Memorial Library,Mississippi State University, Mississippi State, MS 39762, USA; e-mail: [email protected] is Head, Library Technical Services, University Libraries, Western KentuckyUniversity, Bowling Green, KY 42101-1067, USA; e-mail: [email protected] is Serials/Electronic Resources Librarian, Joan and Donald E. Axinn Library,Hofstra University, Hempstead, NY 11549, USA; e-mail: [email protected] Blythe is Serials Access Librarian, Davis Library, University of North Carolina atChapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC 27514-8890, USA; e-mail: [email protected].
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open access and enhance their compliance with these policies.Suber presented two underlying premises that must inform anystrategy of communicating with faculty. The first premise is thatauthors are primary; the amount of OA literature in the worlddepends on them. Authors are the ones who decide whether tosubmit their work to an OA journal (gold OA) and whether todeposit their work in an OA repository (green OA). They also makethe decision about whether to transfer their copyright. The secondpremise is that authors are busy, often too busy to learn muchabout OA and to act on what they know. For example, most facultyauthors believe that all OA is gold OA and that all OA journalscharge author fees, both of which are false.
The combination of the fact that authors are primary andauthors are busy creates a problem. Researchers have an interest inOA both as authors and readers, and they control the solution, butthey rarely focus on OA. The solution, according to Suber, is anudge from the institutions in a unique position to influenceauthor decisions, namely funding agencies and universities. Goodpolicies from these institutions are needed, as well as goodpersuasion for faculty (i.e., messages that work). Suber empha-sized the importance of good policies in the ability to persuadefaculty to follow them. The heart of a good policy consists of fiveelements: mandatory deposit for all articles; deposit at the timethe article is accepted for publication; deposit of the peer-reviewed version of the manuscript; permission to make depos-ited articles open access by default; and a waiver of thatpermission available on request.
Suber next detailed Harvard University's permission model andexplained how it avoided copyright problems. Under the Harvardmodel, faculty grant Harvard University the non-exclusive right todistribute their peer-reviewed articles. Thus, open access throughthe institutional repository DASH (Digital Access to Scholarship atHarvard) becomes the default for Harvard faculty publications.This default advances the cause of open access significantly andincreases faculty participation. Permission to place an article in therepository is not sought case-by-case and no negotiation withpublishers is required since the university has a standing, non-exclusive right to distribute articles written by Harvard faculty.Authors are free to transfer all remaining rights to the publishers ofthe journal in which their article appears. Suber noted thatinstitutional policies requiring faculty to deposit their articles in arepository will fail if the faculty need to negotiate with publishers.However, a policy such as Harvard's allows policy makers toconvey the message, “you don't need to negotiate; you've alreadygiven this right to the university.”
This default permission may be reversed with a waiver.Authors may request a waiver easily using a Web-based form.The process is automatic; no questions are asked, no rationale isneeded, and requests for waivers are never refused. No standingwaivers are allowed; authors must make a separate waiverrequest for each paper. Suber explained that this is needed totruly shift the default to open access. If standing waivers wereallowed, the default for that author would be shifted back to non-OA. The waiver process is a small speed bump that effectivelychanges behavior. Suber noted that the waiver applies to openaccess only, not to deposits. Authors granted a waiver must stilldeposit their articles in the repository so that the institution cantrack and archive the research output of its faculty. However, thearticle remains “dark” and unavailable to the public until suchtime as permission to make the article OA is obtained fromanother source, such as the publisher. Suber elaborated onHarvard's waiver policy, explaining that though the exact rate ofwaivers at Harvard is unknown, it is much lower than expected.Waivers should not be seen as a failure of the institution's policy,
but a virtue of it, since without the waiver system, faculty wouldnot have voted for the policy. Waivers answer faculty fears andconcerns, and, as such, they are beneficial for the advancement ofopen access repositories.
Suber transitioned into a summary of “what works” inrelation to institutional policies for open access repositoriesand messages to faculty. One strategy that works is to getpermission from authors to deposit their work in the repositorybefore they transfer their rights to publishers instead of frompublishers after authors have transferred their rights. Suberexplained that because funders and universities are “upstream”
from publishers in the scholarly production process, they cansecure some rights from authors before those rights are givenaway to publishers. When open access is authorized by copyrightholders, as in Harvard's policy, it is legally bulletproof and battletested. This kind of policy also works because it increasesauthors' control over copyright, which is contrary to their fearfulmisperceptions. While some faculty suspicious of the adminis-tration may suspect a power-grab of rights related to theirresearch, the fact is that with a policy like Harvard's, authorsretain the right to authorize open access that they normallywould not in a standard transfer of copyright to the publisher.Institutions can communicate to authors that with this newdefault, authors retain more rights and have more control overtheir work than previously, and they are still free to transfer theremainder of their rights to publishers.
Suber pointed out that a good policy also preserves authors'freedom to submit to the journals of their choice. Again, this isoften contrary to fearful misperceptions. Suber explained thatmany faculty do not understand the difference between green andgold open access and assume that open access means that theymust submit their research only to OA journals which might nothave the reputation of other journals in their field. It is veryimportant to communicate that this is not the case, as policiesmandating deposit in an institutional repository focus on green notgold OA. Such a policy does not address where authors submittheir work, only what they dowith theirmanuscripts after they areaccepted for publication. Academic freedom is not threatened asfaculty can submit their work to any journal they wish. Subernoted that some university policies give faculty the “choice” ofsubmitting to the institutional repository or to an OA journal.Suber feels that it is better to cleanly separate support for greeninstitutional repositories from gold OA journals so as not toconfuse the two, since confusion between the two has resulted inOA policies being defeated.
Suber explained that it is also important to point out that facultyremain free to decide for or against open access for eachpublication. A policy that mandates deposit but allows for waiversmerely shifts the default to open access but does not coerce facultyto make their work openly available. He likened Harvard'smandate to jury duty: it is a requirement, but there is the abilityto opt out. He noted that policies that merely encourage faculty todeposit their work in a repository do not work and are essentiallyequivalent to the status quo. A mandate requiring deposit isnecessary, but faculty should be allowed to opt out so as topreserve their freedom of choice.
Suber summed up the characteristics of good policies by statingthat good policies do not ask authors to bypass peer review, tosubmit only to certain journals, to negotiate with publishers, toviolate copyright, to decrease their rights over their work, or todecrease access to their work. On the contrary, good policies allowauthors to increase their rights over their work and to increaseaccess to their work. Good policies enhance discoverability andpreservation of authors' work and enlarge the audience and
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impact of that work. Good policies grant an institution the non-exclusive rights they need to do these things.
To garner support for such policies and to enhance compliancewith them once they are passed, researchers need to be educatedabout copyright and open access, as they are often ignorant aboutboth. Suber again pointed out that the group that controls thesolution, the authors, is not the group that understands theproblem, the librarians. Unfortunately, messages from librariansand administrators do not sink in as significantly as messages frompeers. Campaigns for open access can be informed by adminis-trators and librarians but need to be led by faculty.
Regarding copyright, researchers need to understand thatauthors are the copyright holders until they transfer their rights;that transferring full copyright to a publisher gives the OA decisionto the publisher; that many journals will alter the standardcontract when asked; that asking for better terms is risk-free; andthat experts can help by providing model language for authoraddenda to contracts, for example.
Regarding open access, researchers need to understand whichOA journals exist in their field; that some OA journals charge feesand some do not; that there are OA repositories, not just OAjournals; that repository deposits take just a few minutes; thatgreen OA is compatible with non-OA journal publication; thatmost non-OA journals allow OA archiving; and that OA signifi-cantly increases citation impact. Researchers should understandthat it is not charity to deposit in OA repositories; it is in their self-interest, since deposit of research in an OA repository will ensurethe preservation of their scholarship and increase its visibility andaudience.
During the brief question-and-answer period that followedSuber's presentation, one of the questions posed was what versionof the author's manuscript should be deposited in an OArepository. Suber replied that the target was generally the finalversion of the author's manuscript approved by peer review butnot yet copy edited, formatted or paginated. It is true that thepublisher's version is best for citing, but authors care less thanpublishers and librarians about final published versions and willreadily cite papers in repositories. Of course, publishers want todistinguish the final version of the text from other versions and donot like the fact that multiple versions are available. For thatreason, institutional policy should allow for the replacement in therepository of the peer-reviewed manuscript with the finalpublished version if allowed by the publisher. Suber emphasizedthat while publisher versions are easier to cite, it is the finalversion of the language approved by peer review that contains thegood science or scholarship.
Following Suber's talk was a “Persona Exercise” in whichparticipants rotated through small groups and practiced devisinga communication plan to address the interests and needs of aparticular “persona” in their community (for example, an under-graduate social sciences major creating a media project, a graduatestudent in the sciences, the dean of a business school, and thefaculty editor of a society-published journal). Topics addressedincluded copyright, fair use, author rights, and open access.
OA Funds/COPE
After lunch, a series of short updates were presented on legislationand initiatives related to scholarly communication. BarbaraDeFelice, Digital Resources Program director at Dartmouth CollegeLibrary, spoke first on the Compact for Open-Access PublishingEquity (COPE). Institutions participating in COPE commit toprovide funds to pay fees charged to authors publishing in journalsthat make all the articles in the journal openly available. COPE was
initiated by Stuart Shieber, professor of Computer Science atHarvard University and director of the Harvard University Library'sOffice for Scholarly Communication. It was launched in September2009with five institutions signing on to the stated goal of providinga “sufficient and sustainable funding basis for open accesspublication of the scholarly literature.”3 Since then, more institu-tions have joined.
DeFelice explained that COPE's goal is to support authors intheir choice of where to publish by removing cost barriers topublishing in open access journals and to help publishers feelconfident about experimenting with new revenue models.Signatory institutions recognize the crucial value of the servicesprovided by scholarly publishers, the desirability of open access tothe scholarly literature, and the need for a stable source of fundingfor publishers who choose to provide open access to their journals'contents. Common elements of COPE implementations includesupport for author fees charged to faculty and graduate studentauthors affiliated with an institution, a cap on total reimbursementper author (either per article or academic year), and a prohibitionon supporting author fees when grants will pay those fees. Authorfees are only paid for publication in peer-reviewed, open accessjournals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) orwhere the publisher is a member of the Open Access ScholarlyPublishers Association (OASPA) or subscribes to the OASPA Codeof Conduct. Most COPE signatory institutions do not offer supportfor hybrid journals (which provide author-supported open accessto select articles but also charge subscription fees) or for journalswhich offer delayed open access to current articles. DeFelice seesCOPE as supporting the evolution away from subscription-basedrevenue models.
FRPAA Legislation
Next, Carolyn Mills, science librarian at the University of Connecti-cut, provided an update on the Federal Research Public Access Act(FRPAA). This act would require U.S. federal agencies withextramural research budgets of $100 million or more to providepublic access to research manuscripts resulting from their fundingwithin six months of publication in a peer-reviewed journal.FRPAA currently exists as two mirror bills before the United StatesCongress: S1373 submitted in June 2009 and HR5037 submitted inApril 2010. Mills pointed out the differences between FRPAA andthe National Institute of Health (NIH) Public Access Policy. FRPAAwould offer only a six month embargo (as opposed to NIH's twelvemonths), except for authors who are federal agency employeesandwould be granted no embargo period. FRPAA offers options forwhere research can be posted; it does not specify a particularrepository (e.g., PubMed Central) nor does it specify how agenciesand authors will secure legal permission to deposit their research(e.g., by retaining copyright). Support for FRPAA is broad-basedand includes the Obama administration. Unfortunately for advo-cates of open access, opposing legislation is also before the U.S.Congress in the form of HR208, the Fair Copyright in ResearchWorks Act, which would amend copyright law and overturn theNIH Public Access Policy.
Experience at MIT with OA Policy
Ellen Duranceau, program manager, Scholarly Publishing &Licensing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT),provided an update on the MIT Faculty Open Access Policy. TheMIT Faculty Open Access Policy was adopted by a unanimous voteof the faculty in March 2009. It is similar to Harvard's policy in thatit gives MIT nonexclusive permission to make available faculty
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scholarly articles openly on the Web through the DSpace@MITrepository. Duranceau elaborated on the work that has been doneby the MIT Libraries under the guidance of the Faculty Committeeon the Library System to implement the policy in a way that is asconvenient as possible for faculty. TheMIT Libraries are taking threeapproaches to acquiring content for their repository: publishernegotiation, searching for faculty papers on the MIT Web domain,and reaching out to authors for copies of their manuscripts.
Duranceau has negotiated with a number of publishers to allowthe libraries to copy the final published versions of faculty articlesfrompublisherWeb sites and post them to the DSpace institutionalrepository. This approach benefits faculty in that no action isrequired on their part, and faculty tend to prefer the final versionof articles to peer-reviewed manuscripts. Articles acquired frompublisher Web sites in this way account for a large majority ofthe papers posted thus far. Another source of faculty papers isthe MIT Web domain itself. Two Simmons Graduate School ofLibrary and Information Science student interns have beensystematically reviewing the MIT Web domain to look for dataabout papers as well as the full text of papers, which has resultedin about 10 percent of papers posted in the repository. Again, thisapproach requires little direct faculty participation. In the future,it might be possible to automate this process through the use ofWeb crawlers.
The third channel for acquiring faculty papers at MIT is directrequests to faculty by library liaisons to departments. To supportthe work of liaisons contacting faculty, the Open Access PolicyOutreach Team, formed in July 2009, has created a MicrosoftAccess database to track faculty authors and citations and helpmanage the workflow of requesting papers. The databaseprovides information about whether a paper has been optedout, whether the libraries can get it directly from the publisher,from whom and when a paper has been requested, and if thepaper has been received. Duranceau sees this work as anopportunity for librarians to play new and critical roles oncampus through building relationships with faculty and becomingrelevant to their publishing workflow. Plans to expand outreachefforts are underway.
Data Management Outreach at MIT
Amy Stout, computer science librarian at MIT, spoke next on theMIT Libraries' efforts in reaching out to faculty in support of datamanagement. Stout pointed out that many funding agencies nowrequire research data to be made freely available. Support for openaccess to research data is an important service libraries canprovide to researchers. This requires librarians to engage withfaculty earlier in the research process than is the case whenworking with faculty to deposit final versions of articles. MITlibrarians offer many levels of data management support tofaculty. They recommend repositories for the storage of data,including DSpace@MIT, the joint Harvard-MIT Data Center, andoutside repositories. The libraries have also created aWeb guide todata management and publishing, offer a workshop called“Managing Research Data 101,” and conduct one-on-one consulta-tions with faculty members.
Stout explained that MIT librarians' outreach to faculty on datamanagement issues grew organically out of public servicefunctions in the library. A number of librarians began byidentifying faculty to approach through Web sites, news stories,andword ofmouth, as well as through direct requests from faculty.In meetings with faculty members, librarians learn the story of theresearchers' data, including collection methodologies, file formats,how the data are stored and documented, andwhat the potential is
for secondary analysis. The librarians offer guidance on how tomanage the data, including advice on data documentation andmetadata, file formats, data conversion and back up, andintellectual property issues. They educate researchers on thecomponents of data management plans, which will be required forall data generated by National Science Foundation (NSF)-fundedresearch as of October 2010. They also facilitate the deposit ofexisting research data in an archive or repository. As a result, agrowing number of datasets produced by MIT faculty are availablein repositories, and ongoing partnerships have been formedbetween the library and researchers.
Model Author Rights Language
The final update of the afternoon concerned efforts to include authorrights language in library content licenses. Ellen Duranceau of MITreported on the progress of an Association of Research Libraries(ARL) ad-hoc working group formed in October 2009. The goal ofthe working group was to develop model language for use in librarycontent licenses that would secure the right of institutionally-affiliated authors to reuse their work published by the contentprovider for scholarly, educational and non-commercial purposesand to deposit their work in open access archives. Duranceauexplained that although this was not a new idea—MIT and othershave had some success with including author rights language inlicenses—no standard language for license agreements had yet beendeveloped. This project was driven by the idea that an institution-wide agreement negotiated as part of a content license on behalf ofthe institution's researchers would be more efficient and effectivethan relying on the authors themselves to renegotiate rights to reusetheir previously published work or to include author addenda inpublishing agreements for their current work. Although manypublishers have green OA policies that allow the deposit of authorpapers in open access repositories, these policies are variable,confusing, andmutable. Theworking group arrived at the principlesthat author rights language should be simple and concise and shouldfocus on use rights, not copyright retention. It should allowcompliance with institutional and funder mandates requiringdeposit of articles in open access repositories, and it should takeprecedence over any conflicting provisions in individual authoragreements. The working group intentionally omitted any referenceto author copyright retention, moral rights, the mechanics ofdeposit, references to embargoes, and limiting deposit to theauthor's accepted version, explicitly allowing deposit and use ofthe publisher's final version. The model language has just beenreleased and has been endorsed by ARL. Next steps are to furtherdistribute the draft language for public comment and trial use and toseek key endorsements.
In-Depth Question-and-Answer and Discussionwith Peter Suber on OA Topics
Following the updates, an in-depth question-and-answer periodwith Peter Suber rounded out the day. The first question concernedhow to identify open access journals in a discipline and promotethem to faculty. Suber mentioned the Directory of Open AccessJournals (DOAJ), which is organized by discipline. Faculty mightrespond that they have not heard of the journals in the DOAJ,which is not unlikely, because the oldest journals listed are onlyabout ten years old and most are five years old or younger. Even ifthey are excellent, they are not well known. Faculty tend to followprestige over quality, which is unfortunate, since a new journal canbe excellent from birth, but not prestigious from birth. Suberreemphasized that it is not necessary to publish in an open access
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journal in order to make one's research open access. Faculty canopt for the green OA model, publishing in the journal of theirchoice but depositing the peer-reviewed version of their paper inan open access repository. Suber noted that 90 percent of journalsand over 60 percent of publishers allow green OA, and faculty canrequest to deposit articles published in other journals, thoughresearchers at institutions with a Harvard or MIT style policy donot need to make such requests.
Another questioner noted that federal funders, for example theNIH, require the open access deposit of articles resulting fromfunded research. She asked if there are any examples of intra-university funders who do the same, for example deans' offices orfoundations. Suber replied that the Washington State Board forCommunity & Technical Colleges (SBCTC) requires researchresulting from their funding to carry a Creative CommonsAttribution License and be shared in online repositories.4 Thispolicy applies to the research itself, not the researchers affiliatedwith the institutions, as the Harvard and MIT institutional policiesdo. Suber noted that the best practice for funding agencies withopen access mandates is not to allow waivers. Authors meetingpublisher resistance to these policies must find another publisher.This is different from the best practice for university policies,which should include waivers to gain faculty support. In the caseof the NIH, publishers cannot practically refuse to publish NIH-funded research, as it results in approximately 80,000 peer-reviewed journal articles each year. However, smaller fundersmight find that publishers refuse to publish work with suchmandates.
In response to a request for strategies to gain support for openaccess policies from a board of trustees, Suber made the pointthat in most cases where there is faculty support, there isadministrative support. Administrators never support openaccess less than faculty do because administrators are aware ofthe serials pricing crisis, while faculty are not. Administrators seeopen access as a solution to a budget problem, and they tend tosupport the concept. It is the support of the faculty, then, that ismost important to build.
Suber mentioned another advantage of repositories in provid-ing a time stamp on research to show which researchers wrotefirst about a particular topic. He explained that historically journalstook the place of books as the primary source of new scholarshipbecause they came out faster. Now, in some disciplines, the delaybetween acceptance of a paper by a journal and publication can belengthy. Repositories can make new scholarship available soonerthan a journal can, and in so doing can help authors claimownership over their scholarship. Researchers can even post a firstdraft of an article before peer review and revise their submissionlater. This is common in economics where working papers areposted online in the RePEc (Research Papers in Economics)database. In response, an attendee asked if articles were everrejected because they were already available in a repository. Suberresponded that articles are rejected because they are not good. Theexception is with journals that follow the “Inglefinger rule,”whichstarted among medical journals. It states that the journal will notpublish any article already published or publicized elsewhere, theidea being that non-peer reviewed medical research might bedangerous. Subsequently, many non-medical journals adopted thisrule because it protects profits. Fortunately, the rule is in decline,and authors can tell whether a journal follows the rule before theysubmit their work.
The question was raised about whether an author atHarvard needs permission from his or her coauthors beforetheir work is posted in Harvard's repository. Suber replied thatit was incumbent on a Harvard author to inform his or her
coauthors of the policy, and, if any coauthors object, theHarvard author needs to drop them as coauthors or request awaiver. The NIH policy, on the other hand, does not allow forwaivers. All work funded in whole or in part by the NIH issubject to the policy.
In response to a question about whether or not Harvard's policyapplies to previously published faculty articles, Suber explainedthat it did not. The copyright for articles published beforeHarvard's policy was enacted has already been given away to thepublishers. That being said, Harvard welcomes the deposit of olderarticles and provides assistance to faculty in securing the necessarypermissions from publishers. It is also possible for libraries tonegotiate with individual publishers a blanket permission todeposit older articles. Most publishers do not have a problem withmaking older articles via open access, especially significantly olderarticles.
Asked to elaborate on incentives for getting faculty to complywith policies mandating the deposit of their articles in aninstitutional repository, Suber noted that feedback to authors onthe number of downloads of their articles is essential, as downloadcounts today correlate with citation numbers in the future. Manyrepositories highlight articles with the highest number of down-loads in a given month or week. Because faculty are competitive,this fuels participation. The Netherlands, which has a nationalrepository, highlights papers with the most downloads in acategory called the “Cream of Science,” and researchers wanttheir work to be included. A more subtle approach is taken by theUniversity of Minho in Portugal, which gives monetary incentivesto departments with the highest deposit rates.
A concern was raised that it might be a burden to faculty tohave to deposit their papers in an institutional repository whenthey might prefer to deposit in a disciplinary repository such asSocial Science Research Network. Suber responded that softwarethat allows the mutual harvesting of deposits from institutionaland subject repositories is under development. It is called theSWORD (Simple Web-service Offering Repository Deposit)protocol.5 Once this mutual harvesting is implemented, theburden of double deposit will disappear and the stakes will belower for whether an author chooses to deposit in aninstitutional or disciplinary repository. He commented thatmost institutions have an interest in having a full institutionalrepository even if the same paper exists in another repository, asadministrators want to use the institutional repository toshowcase and keep track of faculty publications. Hopefullymethods will be developed for different repositories to alsoshare download data for specific papers.
The last topic in this open discussion was gold OA andsupport for the COPE project. Suber was asked whether hesupported institutions and funders paying article fees forauthors to publish in OA journals, and how he would respondto commentator Stevan Harnad's criticisms of gold OA. Suberpointed out that Harnad believes that green OA must beachieved through repositories before gold OA through openaccess journals can be addressed. Suber stated that hedisagrees and believes both green and gold OA should bedeveloped at the same time. There is a concern that risinglevels of green OA could trigger significant cancellations ofsubscription-based, peer-reviewed journals. Such a scenariocould undermine the system of peer review itself. This has nothappened thus far in physics, but other fields might notbehave like physics in this respect. We can avoid thispossibility and ensure the survival of peer review bycultivating peer-reviewed OA journals at the same time thatwe cultivate rising levels of green OA.
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Notes
1. “Partnering with Faculty: Workshop Presentation Files and Notes,” ScholarlyCommunication Interest Group, August 2, 2010, http://www.acrlnec.org/scig/?cat=3 (accessed August 5, 2010).
2. “About,” Scholarly Communication Interest Group, http://www.acrlnec.org/scig/?page_id=2 (accessed August 5, 2010).
3. “The Compact for Open-Access Publishing Equity,” http://www.oacompact.org/compact/ (accessed August 5, 2010).
4. SBCTC: Washington State Board for Community & Technical Colleges, “RegularMeeting Agenda Item,” http://www.sbctc.edu/general/admin/Tab_9_Open_Licensing_Policy.pdf (accessed August 23, 2010).
5. “SWORDv2 and CRUD,” The Sword Website, http://swordapp.org/ (accessedAugust 6, 2010).
Ninth MidSouth eResource Symposium
Amanda N. Price and Laurel I. Sammonds
Partnering with EBSCO and the North American Serials InterestGroup (NASIG), Mississippi State University (MSU) Librarieshosted the ninth MidSouth eResource Symposium at MSU'sMitchell Memorial Library in Starkville, Mississippi, on Thursday,September 16, 2010. The Symposium offered a one-day venue forlibrarians, library staff and library students across the southeast tolearn about the many issues surrounding print serials andelectronic resources in libraries. The topics presented by thefeatured speakers centered on print collection management andpreservation in an increasingly digitized world, comprehensiveusage measuring and communicating the value of libraryresources, the role of e-books in libraries, work flow transitionsin serials management, and both current and upcoming standardsand initiatives for e-resources.
Striking a Balance in Print CollectionsManagementafter Digitization
Ross Housewright, a research analyst at Ithaka S+R, delivered thekeynote address. The focus of his talk was how libraries canincrease efficiency while balancing the needs of the local patronpopulation with system-wide preservation goals. Housewrightdiscussed two Ithaka S+R initiatives that aim to focus energiestoward this goal: the faculty survey and the “What to Withdraw”
framework, a print collections decision support tool (currentlyunder development) based on a 2009 ITHAKA report.1 Eachinitiative provides a new perspective on local preservation ofmixed digital and print journal collections.
Faculty Survey
The faculty survey conducted by Ithaka S+R in 2009 was thefourth in a series repeated every three years since 2001.2
Participants were faculty at four-year universities in the arts andsciences and in professional fields. Three thousand respondents (arepresentative sample, varying in age, experience, and size ofaffiliated institution) reported on current attitudes toward librarycollection formats and scholarly communications. The results,especially as compared to previous survey data, were quiteilluminating.
According to the results, humanities professors tended to be lessenthusiastic about electronic format over print; but, over time, anincreasing number of faculty in all fields expressed acceptance forthe electronic replacement of print. A minority of faculty werecomfortable with entire print collections discarded in favor ofreplacement by electronic resources. Acceptance for this idea hasalso increased over time, however. Housewright stated that thisindicated faculty's “increasing recognition of the opportunity cost”of supporting underutilized print collections. Housewright ques-tioned whether the majority objection to converting a printcollection to electronic indicated actual use of the print collectionor whether the idea threatened a valuable feeling of security.
As to local or system-wide retention of print journal copies,fewer faculty over time have felt that either is important. Thisrevealed a bit of a paradox: faculty were apathetic about libraries'current print preservation activities, but they were also uncom-fortable with the idea of the library not preserving printcollections. Conversely, long-term preservation of electronicjournals was deemed important by most faculty.
Interestingly, few faculty predicted that e-books would becomevery important to their research and teaching in the next few years,but the number that did predict e-book importance increased overtime. A majority of faculty reported that databases of academicjournals were, at that time, very important to their work. House-wright stated that a transition has taken place for electronicjournals, but it may not necessarily serve as a predictive model formonographs. For most faculty electronic journals have replacedprint copies for most uses. Statistics have shown that e-books havedefinitely notmade the same inroads. Housewright speculated thate-books may, in the future, be supplementary to print collections,or may perhaps facilitate the discovery experience.
Finally, the survey examined attitudes toward the importanceof various library roles. Most faculty felt that the role of the libraryas purchaser (an entity that pays for necessary resources andmaterials) was very important, and a majority felt the same aboutthe library as archive. Over time, fewer faculty have rated the roleof the library as a gateway (a starting point for research) as veryimportant. Faculty viewed the library's teaching and researchsupport as positive but not essential. Housewright noted that theroles that faculty saw as most important were the functions whichoccur behind the scenes—licensing, acquiring, and preservingcontent. These are not activities that cause a daily awareness of thelibrary's support of research and teaching. Housewright ques-tioned how this perception changes faculty's attitudes about thelibrary: is the library more akin to a daily partner for researchactivities or more like infrastructure, necessary but invisible?
Although the survey provides a big-picture perspective onaverage faculty perceptions, Housewright stressed that anyindividual institution should assess its own users' needs andattitudes. And though this survey focused on collections, eachinstitution needs to balance these conclusions with otherdemands, such as those for services. A library's goal should be toform a holistic vision of the future for the library as a single entity,with all elements integrated efficiently.
“What to Withdraw” Framework
Along with digitization and the increasing demand for electronicversions of journal articles, libraries are also facing pressure toreduce the size of their print collections. Libraries canmeet reductionrequirements by providing digital copies for use, while retainingaccess to an archived print backup elsewhere. Ideally, eachinstitution could archive print copies of some titles on behalf of thelibrary community. Thus, over the community as a whole, aminimal
doi:10.1016/j.serrev.2010.12.010
Blythe / Serials Review 37 (2011) 47–60
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