ALA Conference 2009: Forum's "Doomsday Clock" Countdown

ALA 2009: Academic libraries urged to consider maverick models of publishing

Josh Hadro -- Library Journal, 7/16/2009

• "Zero tolerance" for price increases, say panelists
• Radical changes to publishing model under consideration
• Libraries must "wield moral clout"

Academic libraries are approaching midnight on the Doomsday Clock of scholarly communications, said James Neal, vice president for information services and university librarian at Columbia University. He spoke at the 2009 SPARC-ACRL Forum, “Rough Waters: Navigating Hard Times in the Scholarly Communication Marketplace,” Saturday afternoon at the American Library Association (ALA) Annual Conference in Chicago.

According to the forum panelists, libraries need to consider some radical alternatives before the clock strikes 12.

Zero tolerance for price increases
Setting the scene, Association of Research Libraries (ARL) executive director Charles Lowry described the familiar scenario of budget cuts and their fallout.

With institutional endowments down by an average of 16%, some 55% of ARL libraries have already experienced budget cuts, and another 18% expect cuts. With materials reductions of 3% (both mean and median), Lowry said, the message to the publishing community is clear: libraries will have zero tolerance for price increases.

But Ivy Anderson, director of collections at the California Digital Library, noted that that a zero percentage increase in subscription prices is only just the starting point for negotiations. Large-scale journal cancellations are under serious consideration throughout the University of California (UC) system, she said, something indicated in UC's Open Letter to Licensed Content Providers written in May. 

Elsevier impact
Further, she implied that journal publishers with the highest profit margins would be looked upon least favorably.

Offering one example, Anderson examined the UC-affiliated authorship in Elsevier journals, and concluded that 2.2% of journal articles were authored by members of the UC community. From this, Anderson calculated that Elsevier’s UC-related revenue amounted to $31 million, including $9.8 million in profit.

Offering potential alternatives, Anderson laid out the steps taken by the university system to extricate itself from what was repeatedly described as an untenable model. She cited UC’s first-in-the-nation support for the SCOAP3 project and the ambitious UC-Springer Open Access Pilot as examples, but also hinted at “larger strategies to come.”

Publisher perspective
Emma Hill, executive editor of the Journal of Cell Biology from the Rockefeller University Press (RUP), offered a publisher's perspective, albeit a relatively unconventional one. Hill was quick to mention both the small press’s non-profit status and its disavowal of the American Association of University Presses (AAUP) statement in support of Rep. John Conyers’ 2008 Fair Copyright in Research Works Act, further setting RUP apart from larger commercial presses.

Appealing to the scholars, librarians, and administrators in the room, Hill echoed many of the standing arguments in favor of authors retaining rights to the products of their research, and signaled the Journal of Cell Biology’s support for those rights by publishing materials under a Creative Commons license. 

Scholars agreeing to give up copyright, she suggested, is like "giving birth and taking care of a baby for nine months, and then giving the baby over to the midwife at the end of the process."

Maverick scholarship
Moderator Kim Douglas, California Institute of Technology university librarian, introduced closing session speaker Neal as the recent recipient of the 2009 Melvil Dewey Award given by ALA in recognition of creative leadership. Setting the tone for his talk, Neal likened many in the library community to the classical Greek chorus, “standing on the side of the stage, screaming at the actors.”

“I am not confident that our academic leadership gets it,” he said, pointing out that new modes of scholarly communication are necessary, despite recent progress toward increased access to journal content and achieving modest price reductions. 

As something of a primer in “maverick scholarship,” Neal then offered up 12 “innovative approaches to networked digital scholarship.”

Neal proposed breaking down the “Western hegemony” of scholarly publishing, and asked, “Where is SPARC China? Where is SPARC India?“ From there, he pitched a move from what he called the capitalist publishing model to something that looks more like socialism, taking on the costs of publishing more material in-house and “bringing the means of production back into the library."

Publishers ought to consider the serialization of extended written arguments as an alternative to problematic academic monographs, he said, and questioned whether researchers are responsible toward their institutions or to their academic discipline. How far, he asked, does responsibility to funding and grant providers extend?  

Let the countdown begin
“It’s time to give up the kumbaya of librarianship,” Neal said as he approached his last few proposals, and “radicalize our approach to collaboration.”

We are just a few minutes from midnight, he said as he invoked the Doomsday Clock metaphor to dramatically portray the relationship between libraries and publishers. We are, he warned, quickly headed “toward potentially explosive conditions.” 

His solution: libraries must wield their moral clout and use “collective action to influence inappropriate behavior,” punishing uncooperative publishers with withheld funds while rewarding those more progressive.

Questions following Neal's presentation were supportive (though perhaps lacking the urgency fitting of a doomsday scenario), and focused on how to translate these calls to the profession into action.

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