I did mention it briefly, saying "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, look, not every thing anyone writes about scholarly publishing can touch on
every aspect of the problem and possible solutions. I was responding to the
ridiculous accolades being given to Harvard for their latest "challenge" to
publishers. Their complaint was about the rising cost of journals, and I wanted
to point out that they're facing this problem because they've never tried to
deal with it. This rising cost of journals is, obviously, related to, but not
identical to, the problem of providing access to a university's scholarly
output. This is another area where the university's response has been woefully
inadequate, but it was not the subject of my post.
On Tue, May 1, 2012 at 11:14 AM, Steve Hitchcock <sh...@ecs.soton.ac.uk> wrote:
> I agree that universities should take control of their own
scholarly content.
Mike, Â Where does your article say this? How are you proposing they do
this? Perhaps this was not an angle you wanted to cover in this article,
but hard to ignore in a 20 year view.
Repositories were not attempting to 'challenge' the system, but to solve
the access problem, by working with and extending the system. They do
that, for people who use repositories.
Nor are repositories trying to take 'ownership' of the process, although
the more content they can provide the more of a stake they have in
continuing the process towards more access.
These sound like terms used when someone wants to solve a problem by first
replacing the incumbents, rather than someone who first wants to solve the
problem.
Steve
On 1 May 2012, at 17:34, Michael Eisen wrote:
> 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 <sh...@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: sh...@ecs.soton.ac.uk
> Twitter: http://twitter.com/stevehit
> Connotea: http://www.connotea.org/user/stevehit
> Tel: +44 (0)23 8059 9379 Â Â 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 universityâs 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 committeeâs
recommendations, and the silence of the universityâs administration, are
just the latest manifestation of the toothless response of American
universities to the âserials crisisâ 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 theyâd
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 â indeed, they need them to do their work. They canât
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-1990â²s,
fate handed universities an out â the internet. In the early 1990â²s 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 âopen accessâ, 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 â 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.
> >
> > Itâs never too late
> >
> > Although their record is pretty bad, universities could still play a
major role in making scholarly publishing work better â and save
themselves money in the process â 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 â theyâll 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 â and heavily promote â 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, âWho goes first?â 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 nationâs major research universities to fish or cut bait.
Collectively, they have both opportunity and motiveâand, in the
Association of American Universities, they have an organization with the
capacity to convene the necessary negotiations.
> >
> > Itâs amazing that essentially noboby took them up on the challenge the
first time. Letâs hope it doesnât take  another 15 years.
> >
> >
> >
> > _______________________________________________
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>
>
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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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--
Michael Eisen, Ph.D.
Investigator, Howard Hughes Medical Institute
Associate Professor, Department of Molecular and Cell Biology
University of California, Berkeley
[ Part 2: "Attached Text" ]
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