[GOAL] Re: 20 years of cowardice: the pathetic response of American universities to the crisis in scholarly publishing
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: sh94r at ecs.soton.ac.uk Twitter: http://twitter.com/stevehit Connotea: http://www.connotea.org/user/stevehit Tel: +44 (0)23 8059 9379Fax: +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 university?s 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 committee?s recommendations, and the silence of the university?s administration, are just the latest manifestation of the toothless response of American universities to the ?serials crisis? 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 they?d 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
[GOAL] Re: 20 years of cowardice: the pathetic response of American universities to the crisis in scholarly publishing
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 sh94r at ecs.soton.ac.ukwrote: 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: sh94r at ecs.soton.ac.uk Twitter: http://twitter.com/stevehit Connotea: http://www.connotea.org/user/stevehit Tel: +44 (0)23 8059 9379Fax: +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 university?s 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 committee?s recommendations, and the silence of the university?s administration, are just the latest manifestation of the toothless response of American universities to the ?serials crisis? 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 they?d 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
[GOAL] Re: 20 years of cowardice: the pathetic response of American universities to the crisis in scholarly publishing
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 sh94r at ecs.soton.ac.ukwrote: I agree that universities should take control of their own scholarly content. Mike, 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 sh94r at 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: sh94r at ecs.soton.ac.uk Twitter: http://twitter.com/stevehit Connotea: http://www.connotea.org/user/stevehit Tel: +44 (0)23 8059 9379Fax: +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
[GOAL] Re: 20 years of cowardice: the pathetic response of American universities to the crisis in scholarly publishing
I agree that universities should take control of their own scholarly content. Mike, 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 9379Fax: +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
[GOAL] Re: 20 years of cowardice: the pathetic response of American universities to the crisis in scholarly publishing
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
