Today’s the Last Day: Make the Case for Open Access | Peer to Peer Review
The time to send messages to the White House ended January 21
Barbara Fister, Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN -- Library Journal, 1/21/2010
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Have you told the White House what you think about open access to publicly funded research? The Office of Science and Technology Policy has been accepting comments for weeks now, but the window of opportunity to add your thoughts closes today.
You haven’t commented yet? Do it now. Don’t worry. I’ll wait for you.
Okay, now that you’re back, I want to confess that there’s a lot involved that I don’t personally understand: the technical requirements, the need for uniformity, the way the deposits should work—I don’t have opinions on the fine points. What I do believe, though, is that the research funded by our tax dollars is important because it’s a public good. We wouldn’t be funding it with public dollars otherwise. It’s good for academic science, but it’s good for industry, too. (See also what ALA/ACRL and ARL have to say.)
Sharing science
My son is a physics postdoc at the Argonne National Laboratory. He does things with our tax dollars that I couldn’t begin to explain, but I do get that what he does may end up improving batteries that will be sold in products that we’ll be using—laptops, cars, you name it. It’s good for consumers. It’s good for business. And it’s especially good for pushing forward the frontiers of what we know about materials at a very fundamental level. (I mean, he fires photons at stuff to see what happens. That’s pretty basic.)What if students or faculty at my college need to read up on the latest research published by the people whose synchrotron is funded by our taxes? Well, they’re probably in luck. Physicists are big on sharing. They’ve been doing it for years, through arXiv and by making their own society publications open access friendly. Not everything is available, of course, but quite a lot is. They still publish massive amounts of research, but somehow they feel their interest in supporting a quality publishing operation is not incompatible with fast and free dissemination of results.
Not on the same page
Other science disciplines taught at my campus aren’t quite as open. In biology, there are myriad worthy societies that rely on earnings from library subscriptions, and there are even more commercially-published journals that rank high in importance. Neuroscience is an exciting concentration that is attracting a lot of students but, oy, it’s expensive. Like physics, chemistry has a major society that represents many branches of the field, but its journals are pricey and the logic of open access is not wired into the discipline as it is in physics.We also pay a lot just to find out what we don’t have. Our most expensive specialized databases are those covering chemistry and mathematics literature. The vast majority of what these tools index is published in journals we can’t afford, but, if we expect our faculty to be active scholars (and we do), there’s really no alternative. We have to hope that the land grant university up the road whose library we depend on will have enough tax-supported funding to provide access to the fair-use articles we can obtain, and that we’ll be able to afford copyright fees for the rest. For this to work, somebody, somewhere, has to buy a subscription.
Many small colleges like mine are going straight to paying commercial publishers for articles at point of need, and they’re saving a lot of money on subscriptions. But this means that, by design, there is no public asset to explore, even on a licensed, temporary basis. Scientific research is thus a disposable unit purchased for individuals, a solution that still costs libraries thousands of dollars per year. That’s a savings that comes at a steep cost.
Whose crisis?
This situation, of course, is often mistakenly called “the serials crisis.” It might be more accurate to call it the humanities crisis, because both my library and the research university we count on have less money for books, which are the lifeblood of many humanities disciplines. We know we have to pay fees for journal articles, because the only way we share them is by copying. Thanks to the first sale doctrine, we can share a book until it falls apart—and it’s politically a lot easier to not buy a book than it is to cancel a journal or database subscription.Here’s another thing: it has always seemed peculiar to me that the “5/5 rule” CONTU guideline for the interlibrary loan (ILL) of articles is a flat rate of five articles, published within the most recent five years, regardless of the size of a journal. We can get five articles from a science journal that publishes 1000 short articles a year—and five articles from a humanities journal that publishes 20 long articles a year. That doesn’t seem right, but such are the peculiar metrics of copyright compromises. It’s considered fair use to request by ILL some 20 percent of the humanities journal before paying copyright fees (which tend to be very affordable, anyway) but only one half of one percent of the big science journal, for which copyright fees typically cost the price of a scholarly trade paperback in the humanities. No wonder we’re buying fewer books.
Science in the public interest
We have a long way to go before we sort out the economics of publishing in a digital world. Book publishers are sweating over when to release ebooks, and the newspaper of record is poised to start charging frequent flyers.But this one is a no-brainer. We believe science is valuable enough that we pour public funding into it. We need to make sure that the results of that funding helps advance our knowledge of the physical and natural world, and that won’t happen if libraries can no longer afford it. Let’s make sure our investment pays off—for the public good.
The White House wants to hear from us. Add your comments to the open forum today.
Barbara Fister is a librarian at Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN, a contributor to ACRLog, and an author of crime fiction. Her next mystery, Through the Cracks, will be published by Minotaur Books this year.
Today’s the Last Day: Make the Case for Open Access | Peer to Peer Review - 1/21/2010 - Library Journal
At SPARC-ACRL Forum, Reality Check on Open Access Monographs - 1/21/2010 - Library Journal
At SPARC-ACRL Forum, Reality Check on Open Access Monographs - 1/21/2010 - Library Journal
At SPARC-ACRL Forum, Reality Check on Open Access Monographs
Josh Hadro -- Library Journal, 1/21/2010
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- Unprecedented dissemination opportunities, but difficulty for business models
- "Average" OA humanities monograph runs at a deficit
- Experiments under way to see what works
Open access (OA) publishing models, pricing concerns, and the cannibalization of print sales were the headline topics at the SPARC-ACRL forum session on Saturday at the ALA 2010 Midwinter Meeting in Boston, titled "The Ebook Transition: Collaboration and Innovations Behind Open Access Monographs."
The conclusion? Open access monographs are an unprecedented boon to the scholarly mission of dissemination, yet challenge the financial sustainability of an academic press.Introducing the panelists, David Carlson, incoming chair of the SPARC steering committee and dean of library affairs at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, said that the scholarly market demands ebooks, regardless of the difficulties they pose for publishers and libraries. The three panelists then described their attempts to meet that demand.
Bearish outlook for OA monographs
Michael Jensen, director of strategic web communications for the National Academies Press (NAP), was the first to suggest the bad news/good news proposition: the press’s sales have actually declined, but NAP has fulfilled more of its mission of achieving maximal dissemination."There's an awful lot of reading going on," Jensen said of NAP's open content, which draws on average ten page views for each distinct visitor. However, only 0.3% of visitors purchase anything. The press has experimented with making the best non-optimal version (HTML page access) free, while offering the optimal version (PDF download) for a fee. The content is openly available, he said, but you can't easily read the free version on an airplane, for example, since pages must be requested individually online. This encourages users to buy the text as an ebook.
Aside from not worrying about royalties for the content it publishes on behalf of the National Academies, Jensen said NAP faces slightly less pressure since its support is guaranteed by the Academies. Similarly, the press functions under the umbrella of scientific funding rather than under a humanities mindset, where requests as small as staff computers can pose budget anxiety.
"I've never been more bearish on the future," Jensen concluded, adding that the near-term holds serious risks for monograph publishers, and that specialty markets for OA monographs likely won't function without explicit institutional support.
Taking stock of the "average" OA monograph
Patrick Alexander, director of the Penn State University Press, similarly cited tension between OA and “the practical goal of sustainability," then analyzed the press's open access Romance [language] Studies collection.A 256 page "average monograph" has a list price of $57.88 for a cloth edition and $30.50 for paper (though many sales are at a significant discount). Meanwhile, it’s alsn made available at no cost to the end user in PDF sections. This press sells an average of just 95 copies in cloth and 279 copies in paper.
Thus, the "visible" first copy costs total about $5223, including editing and materials, as well as Cataloging in Publication filing and copyright registration. Beyond that are “invisible costs” for processes like validating metadata and software training for staff. Other overhead costs such as university support, facilities, personnel, and equipment add up to another $5,188, he said, bringing the total cost for the first digital and print copy to about $10,411.In the end, each title runs a deficit of $9,898, Alexander said, with the obvious conclusion that the current model doesn't demonstrate financial sustainability. Still, the press has reached most of its dissemination goals, with some titles still getting significant traffic online two years after publication, an unusual sign of interest for this specialized field.
Value of experimentation
Finally, Maria Bonn, newly appointed associate university librarian for publishing at the University of Michigan, described her institution's similar experiments with "calculated risk-taking" in the service of scholarly access.She described three open access efforts, including an imprint called digitalculturebooks, the inclusion of retrospective press titles in the HathiTrust, and a partnership with the Open Humanities Press. As with the other OA efforts described at the panel, Bonn said that making the digitalculturebooks materials available online represented purely additive costs on top of regular cost of producing a print title.
The response to the imprint—which covers topics particularly suited to an online audience—has been generally good in terms of both sales and online visibility, but Bonn said it’s unclear whether this and other efforts would be viable over the long term.
Weak sales or not, "we think it's the right thing to do," she said. "It's the purpose of the press to support scholarly access."
For now, it seems, publishers support such experiments to generate valuable data about open publishing models, but it is also clear they can't continue forever.
At SPARC-ACRL Forum, Reality Check on Open Access Monographs - 1/21/2010 - Library Journal
Association of Research Libraries :: ARL/ACRL Institute on Scholarly Communication Webinar Series
Association of Research Libraries :: ARL/ACRL Institute on Scholarly Communication Webinar Series
ARL/ACRL Institute on Scholarly Communication Webinar Series Strengthening Programs Through Collaboration This 8-part webinar series will assist libraries in taking their scholarly communication programs to the next level. Featured guest speakers will provide practical perspectives on emerging areas in scholarly communication. Throughout the series, participants will have opportunities to build and develop a network of colleagues and to review how local successes and activities can build towards a comprehensive program plan.
Audience: The series is designed to cover a broad range of topics geared toward graduates of the popular ARL/ACRL Scholarly Communication Institute, as well as others with responsibilities in the area of scholarly communication. Specific webinars may also appeal to a broader audience of librarians who feel they need to be better informed of scholarly communication issues. Organizations are welcome to participate as a group, or librarians can participate individually.
Format: Each webinar will be one hour in length, followed by an optional half-hour online breakout discussion session. Sessions will take place in an interactive, online classroom environment. They will be recorded and made available to registrants as an archive, so if you sign up for the full series but cannot attend a particular session, there will be an opportunity to catch up later. Optional pre-work assignments will be available in advance to enrich the experience or to provide the necessary background to bring participants up to speed in advance of the sessions.
Libraries may wish to collaborate on pre-work assignments with neighboring libraries (or more distant libraries virtually). A list of registrants will be available in advance to facilitate coordination of such collaboration.
Timing: The series will begin in March 2010 and conclude in November with one webinar per month, except for August.
Registration: Participants can choose to register for the whole series at a fee of $325.00 (paid in two installments), or for individual sessions at of fee of $50.00 each.
Believing that it is crucial for libraries to sustain commitment to building scholarly communication programs, the sponsors of the institute are underwriting the costs to bring this webinar series to you at a greatly reduced price. We are pleased to offer this opportunity to engage virtually as we know that your professional development dollars are limited. Webinars take place in an interactive, online classroom environment with one user/one login per group. If you wish to participate as a group, one person must register, login, and keyboard during the event. Your institution could project the webcast to participants in the same location. Class size is limited to X logins. Full refunds will be granted up to X days prior to the start of the seminar.
Association of Research Libraries :: ARL/ACRL Institute on Scholarly Communication Webinar Series