FROM GREEK CHORUS TO ODYSSEUS
THE ROLE OF THE LIBRARY COMMUNITY
IN CHANGING SCHOLARLY COMMUNICATION
ACRL/NY Symposium
Baruch College
3 December 2004
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GREEK CHORUS
A company of actors who comment by speaking or
singing in unison on the action of a classical play.
Laughter on American television has taken the place
of the chorus in Greek tragedy…In other countries, the
business of laughing is left to the viewers. Here, their
laughter is put on the screen, integrated into the show.
It is the screen that is laughing and having a good time.
- Jean Baudrillard (1986)
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SCHOLARLY COMMUNICATION
KEY ISSUES
• Imbalance in information price relative to value
and source costs.
• Time lag between authorship, peer review,
publication, and dissemination.
• Imbalance in information authorship, ownership,
and proprietary rights.
• Unrecognized as public policy issue.
3
INSTITUTIONAL MANAGEMENT
STRATEGIES
• Journal cancellations/reduced acquisitions
• Improved document delivery service models
• Cooperative collection development
• Site licensing for electronic information
resources
• Consortial licensing by groups of institutions
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Lessig
Constraints On Open Access
To Information
Market
Technology
INFORMATION
Law
Norms
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SCHOLARLY ACTIVITY
• Creation of knowledge and evaluation
of its validity
• Preservation of information
• Transmission of information to others
• Technologies
• Economics
• Institutions
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THE URGE TO PUBLISH
• Communication
• Academic Culture
• Preservation of Ideas
• Prestige and Recognition
• Profit
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SCHOLARLY COMMUNICATION
CONCERNS
• Choking on the Proliferation
• Location of Quality Marking
• Corporate Economy Overtakes Guild Economy
• Dysfunctional Market
• Intellectual Property Ownership
• Darwinian/Capitalistic/Socialist Solutions
• New Models of Digital Scholarship
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Roots Of Dysfunction
Scholarship
Goal
Strategy
Reward
wide distribution
of work
publish
reputation, tenure
promotion, compensation
Commerce
maximize shareholder
value
control information
access and price
increased financial
return
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THE JOURNEY OF ODYSSEUS
FROM TROY TO ITHACA
THE JOURNEY OF THE LIBRARY COMMUNITY
FROM MARKET COMPETITION
TO OPEN ACCESS
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SCHOLARLY PUBLISHING
AND
ACADEMIC RESOURCES COALITION
SPARC
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SPARC MESSAGES
• Barrier-Free Access to Research
• Risks of Industry Consolidation
• Protect/Expand Author Rights
• Community Control of Scholarly Communication
• Incubation of Alternative Channels
• Hope/Power/Action through Collaboration
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SPARC PROGRAMS
 Publishing Partnerships
 Gaining Independence
 Create Change
 Consulting Group/
Legal Services
 Leading Edge
 Institutional Repository
 Scientific Communities
 Open Access
 Declaring Independence
 Next Step
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ARL OPEN ACCESS AGENDA
Open Access: works created with no expectation of
financial remuneration and made available at no cost to
reader on the public Internet for purposes of education
and research.
Readers of open access works could read, download, copy,
distribute, print, search, or link for any lawful purpose,
without financial, legal or technical barriers.
Open Archives Initiative
Keystone and Tempe Principles
Public Library of Science
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ARL OPEN ACCESS AGENDA
• Society benefits from the open exchange of ideas.
• Limitations on access to copyrighted materials
negatively impact the creation, dissemination
and use of intellectual property.
• Copyright exists for the public good.
• Federal investment in R&D is leveraged by access
to research results.
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OPEN ACCESS MODELS
• Berlin Declaration on Open Access to Knowledge in the
Sciences and Humanities
• Budapest Open Access Initiative
• Bethesda Statement on Open Access Publishing
• free, irrevocable, worldwide right of access
• license to distribute, transmit, display, make derivative works,
make printed copies with attribution
• online repository for distribution, interoperability and long-term
archiving
• quality assurance and recognition in evaluation
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WHAT IS OPEN ACCESS?
• Immediate free availability on the public Internet
• Research literature that scholars produce without
expectation of payment
• An access model not a business model
• Open archives can exist alongside traditional publishing
• Open-access journals require alternative business
models to replace subscription-based models
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FLAVORS OF OPEN ACCESS
• Open access – immediate free availability on the public
Internet
• Discretionary open access – open access at author discretion,
typically for payment of a fee
• Embargoed open access – gated access within embargo period
(varying from a few months to two years), with no-fee
access after embargo period lapses
• Reverse embargo – no-fee access for first one to six months after
publication, with gated access thereafter
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NATIONAL INSTITUTES OF HEALTH PROPOSAL
• NIH grantees requested to deposit final accepted
manuscripts (author’s word processing file after all
modifications due to peer review) in PubMed Central
• Freely available to public 6-months after publication
• PMC will replace with published version if publisher
agrees
• Shared with other international repositories to maximize
archiving
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WHAT COMES AFTER NIH?
• International movement in biomedicine spurred by NIH
leadership
• Other US agencies?
• Institutional repositories
• Journal publishing business model experiments
• Deconstructing the journal




Registration – Establishing intellectual ownership
Certification – Certifying quality/validity.
Awareness – Assuring accessibility.
Archiving
– Preserving for future use.
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REPOSITORY MOVEMENT
 Discipline Repositories
 Institutional Repositories
 Consortium Repositories
 Departmental/School Repositories
 Individual Repositories
 Referatories/Virtual Repositories
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CRISIS IN SCHOLARLY COMMUNICATION
• World production of published materials continues to increase
• Cost of research publications continues to inflate at
unprecedented rates
• Acquisitions budgets have not kept pace with inflation,
particularly for journals
• More expensive commercial publishers taking over from
academic/society publishers
• Declining percentage of acquisitions funds invested in new
monographs
• Electronic production, storage and distribution of research
information of growing importance
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MONOGRAPH PUBLISHING TRENDS
• Decline in Monograph Purchasing by Libraries
• Ascendancy of Bookstore Chains and Online
Book Sales
• Declines in Specialized Monograph Publishing
• Economic Pressures on University Presses/Small
Academic Publishers
• Impact on Research in Humanities and Social
Sciences
• Impact on Promotion/Tenure in Some Fields
• Experimentation with Electronic Monographs
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ELECTRONIC BOOKS
RANDOM FUTURE ISSUES
• Purchase vs. Lease
• Free vs. Sold
• Self-Published vs. Commercially Published
• Retrospective Works vs. New Works
• Text vs. Multimedia
• Proprietary vs. Open Formats/Readers
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ELECTRONIC BOOKS
RANDOM FUTURE ISSUES
• Offline vs. Online Access
• Offline vs. Online Use
• Individual Works vs. Searchable Database
• Print vs. Non-Print
• Consultation vs. Circulation
• Archived vs. Fluid Content
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PUBLISHING INDUSTRY CONSOLIDATION
AND MERGERS
SOME BASIC FACTS
• History of Merger Activity
• Motivations for Mergers and Company Acquisitions
• Guild Economy to Corporate Economy
• Impact of Academic Publishing Marketplace
• Impact of Size on Pricing
• International Context of Publishing Industry
• Antitrust Legal Context
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INDUSTRY CONSOLIDATION THREATENS
ACCESS TO RESEARCH
THE MESSAGE OF THE INFORMATION ACCESS ALLIANCE
•
Access to a broad spectrum of research improves
people’s lives.
•
Publisher mergers are a threat to innovation because they
reduce access.
•
Publisher mergers cause consumers to pay higher prices
without increased quality.
•
The criteria used by the Department of Justice to analyze
publisher mergers must change in order to preserve
access to important research.
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KEY COPYRIGHT DEVELOPMENTS
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
International Agreements
Laws and Legislation
Court Cases
Licensing Arrangements
Use Guidelines
Technological Controls/Digital Rights Management
Ownership of Copyright
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ROLE OF LIBRARIANS
• Knowledgable Resources for Community
• Promoters of Open Strategies
• Political and Legislative Advocates for
Community Interests
• Educators of Community on Developments
and Issues
• Users of Economic Clout to Influence Market
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HAVE WE MADE A DIFFERENCE?
• Have publication prices gone down? Why?
• Are research results circulating more quickly? How?
• Are institutions or individuals asserting some control over
their intellectual property?
• Has academic publisher consolidation been reduced?
• Have SPARC publishing partnerships been more
additive than competitive?
• Are researchers/academic administrators talking more
about scholarly publishing issues?
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HAVE WE MADE A DIFFERENCE?
• Is open access truly an alternative to publisher-based
scholarly publishing?
• In the absence of a coordinated plan for archiving of digital
publications, will open access models survive?
• Can peer-review and open access models come together?
• Are editorial boards willing and able to break away from
commercial publishers?
• Will scholarly communication be embraced as an important
public policy issue?
• Will fair use survive the legislative battles?
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HIGHER EDUCATION
CORE INTERESTS
• Competitive Market
• Easy Distribution and Reuse
• Innovation Applications of Technology
• Quality Assurance
• Permanent Archiving
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FUTURE OF PUBLISHING
RESEARCH COMMUNITY STRATEGIES
• Market Conforming
• Market Distorting
• System Transforming
• System Busting
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SCHOLARLY PUBLISHING
2020
• Chaos Breeds Life
• Information Anarchy
• Information Fascism
• Information Utopia
• Information Theology
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ODYSSEUS
FROM TROY TO ITHACA
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
•
Land of the Lotus-Eaters
Cave of the Cyclops
Winds of AEolus
Magic of Circes
Songs of the Sirens
Heads of Scylla
Whirlpool of Charybdis
Allures of Calypso
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