At SPARC Digital Repository Meeting, Shulenberger Calls Out AAUP, ACS

Andrew Albanese -- Library Journal, 11/20/2008 1:14:00 PM

In his closing keynote address at the 2008 SPARC Digital Repositories Meeting, in Baltimore, MD, David Shulenberger, VP of academic affairs at the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges (NASULGC), offered seven steps toward a brighter, digital repository future. Then, in notable aside to one of the steps, he called out the Association of American University Presses (AAUP) and the American Chemical Society (ACS) for working against the best interests of the academy.

Describing one of his seven steps, Shulenberger urged participants to educate campus units, “such as university presses,” to help convince them “to support, not oppose” the best interests of their faculty. He criticized AAUP and the American Chemical Society for their support of the controversial Fair Copyright in Research Works Act, which would bar federal agencies from requiring public access in exchange for grant funding, and, he said, “make building digital repositories far more difficult.”  

Shulenberger acknowledged things are tough all over for higher education: strapped budgets and a deepening recession, exacerbated by a period of uneasy, intense technological change. In such difficult financial times, “we can’t afford to have those who benefit from the university environment working in ways so detrimental to it,” he asserted. “[Presses and ACS] need to understand the perspective of the community in which they live. Their organizations’ continued good health is dependent on the health of the larger academic community,” he noted, urging attendees to work with these organizations to “change such organized resistance.”  

Simmering discontent
Shulenberger’s remarks gave public voice to a simmering concern among libraries and faculty, as AAUP has gone against the library and research communities to support the Fair Copyright bill, as well as with the recent lawsuit against Georgia State University over its e-reserve policy. Two of the plaintiffs in that landmark case are university presses (Oxford and Cambridge).

In 2007, there was a significant backlash among academic presses over the role AAUP’s partner organization, the Association of American Publishers (AAP), played in the PRISM (Partnership for Research Integrity in Science & Medicine) campaign, the publishing communities’ PR attempt to block the NIH public access policy. James Jordan, president and director of Columbia University Press, resigned from the AAP’s Executive Council over PRISM, and Stephen Bourne, chief executive officer of Cambridge University Press, slammed the campaign as “oversimplistic and ill-judged.” 

The issues of course, run deeper than simply “educating” university presses. In recent years, subsidies at many university presses have been slashed and institutional support has waned. Libraries, with stretched budgets, have bought fewer monographs, and the consolidation in the bookselling market has left university presses increasingly alone to fend for their survival. It’s time, Shulenberger, urged, for all campus units, to find ways to pull in the same direction, for everyone’s common benefit. “We are in a period of predicted long duration when the competition for public and philanthropic dollars will be intense,” he noted. “This is a time to lift the bushel and let universities shine.”

Seven steps 
Shulenberger offered strong support for digital repositories, which he said was the “most effective way” to get scholarly information to the public that needs it. “With digital repositories in place, the limitations on distribution imposed by scholarly journals, proximity of the viewer, etc., no longer have to constitute a bar to access,” he noted. He offered participants seven steps to help get to that next level: 

• Make sure that there is a digital repository available for your university’s faculty. 
• Work with administrators to acknowledge the benefits of broadening distribution, and that your university will reap those benefits by using the repository.
• Initiate discussions involving administration and faculty about current practices and intellectual property policies—in other words, “emulate Harvard.”
• Support efforts to spread public access policies like those of NIH to all federal funding agencies and foundations.
• Work with e campus units, (such as university presses), to support, not oppose, the best interests of their faculty.
• Work with departments and faculty to develop habits of depositing in the repository. 
• Work with PR units so that the public, donors, and legislators know to look to your institutional repository to find reliable information

Getting there, Shulenberger observed, will not be easy. University administrators are “more uncertain about the future than I have ever seen them,” he noted. But he also suggested that promoting the digital repository could be a “means to entice additional funding” from their states or donors. “The digital repository can be the equivalent of the unchaining of the bibles. Real access can be had from every kitchen table.”

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