If It's Broke, Fix It | Peer to Peer Review

Barbara Fister, Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN -- Library Journal, 11/5/2009

Tom Peters has a wide-ranging essay in Library Journal about "the future of reading" that is really more of a manifesto about the future of libraries and where we should put our efforts—on being a champion not of libraries nor of books, but of readers.

"What worries me," he writes, "is not so much that reading will become an attenuated, marginalized field of practice but that the developmental paths of librarianship and reading will diverge in the 21st century."

That made me think about academic libraries. We are pretty good at providing what students and faculty tell us they need within our means, but we could do a much better job of aligning the ways scholars produce knowledge and the ways we make it available. We need to think about how we can stand up for the rights of our clientele to have robust access to information as digital formats evolve—without getting sucked into a pay-per-view world that some commercial competitors embrace.

A reader's bill of rights

What particularly caught my eye was the question Peters poses: Who will stand up for readers in the face of the electronic property rights claims being staked out by publishers?

Individual readers aren't in a position to demand a better deal from publishers who place all kinds of restrictions on digital texts, but Peters thinks that librarians, as a collective force, have the clout to take a stand on behalf of readers.

He sketches out the beginnings of a "bill of rights" for readers that includes some startlingly sensible ideas—some of which have already been rejected by publishers and authors, the rest of which probably will be rejected once it they get wind of it. These include:

• Being able to read however one wants on the device of one's choice. Text-to-speech should be an option, one that the Kindle 2 enabled but agreed to disable when the Authors Guild objected. This is a prime example of our digital dilemma: An improvement that technology makes possible has to be shelved because audio rights have always been sold separately—never mind that well-produced audio books offer an aesthetic experience quite different than mechanical speech. One step forward, two steps back.
• Being able to "embellish" a text so long as the changes are distinguishable from the original and to save and share these "embellishments." Stand by for objections that these one man's embellishment is another man's derivative work, requiring "permission" (i.e. payment).
• Being able to have access to the text you acquire "in all modes and instances and on all devices" for the duration of an "ownership agreement." Though publishers will object that this is too generous, I have other concerns. While I can see the attractions of having Netflix-like access to a wide range of titles that can be sampled for a determined period of time (just as one can read and return books in the collection of your local public library), I'm nervous about companies retaining total control over electronic content. The Kindle 1984 debacle pointed out ways that a civil suit (perhaps a case of libel tourism) might result in all copies of a book being altered at the flick of a switch. And readers' privacy? Forget about it.

In many ways, Peters isn't asking for much. He hasn't had the audacity to suggest readers should have a right to share a book with a friend, for instance. Interestingly, Barnes & Noble has offered limited sharing as an incentive to buy their new Nook reading device—but none of the major publishing houses will participate. They're not thinking about what readers want, and that shortsightedness will frustrate efforts to grow the market for books.

What rights do we defend?

Academic libraries, which are the primary market for academic texts, have been wrestling with our own futures. We have called publishers out on practices that seem hostile to their audiences (who are largely their unpaid authors). We've worked with scholars to create alternatives to overpriced commercial journals. We've tried to create homes for depositing scholarship online and have chivvied our colleagues into adopting mandates to populate them.

But we actually contribute to the problem. When academics want access to research, we do what we can to provide it—and we don't always explain to them the cost, both monetary and in terms of shoring up a broken system.

Instead, we continue to shoulder the increasing cost of databases and journals at the expense of purchasing the books that remain critical for some disciplines. We're switching to buying one article at a time rather than building collections—saving money, but letting go of the idea that we're creating a campus commons where disciplines can meet and conversations can happen.

Giving ground to competitors

Meanwhile, entrepreneurs are looking for ways to profit by bypassing libraries.

Recently there has been some buzz about a "Netflix for science articles" called DeepDyve which charges the magical iTunes price of 99 cents for "access" to articles that you can examine temporarily in a flash player, but can't save, print, or copy. The market for this "rental" system is unaffiliated researchers who don't have access to a library and don't want to pay the publisher's going rate for purchasing a .pdf, at least not until they're sure it's exactly what they want.

Some librarians think this sounds great. What a bargain! Can we do that, too? But in the comments on a Scholarly Kitchen blog post about the product, it turns out the search engines leave much to be desired and the participating publications are limited. DeepDyve, it appears, is one of many startups paving another tollroad for access to scholarly content. Meanwhile, consumers are finding their own workarounds. They use their network of contacts, post requests online, or visit other file-sharing sites.

If there's really a market for this, why couldn't publishers let libraries serve unaffiliated researchers—supplying access to materials for a user fee shared with vendors and publishers? But no, we aren't seen as potential partners in this enterprise, only as one revenue stream among many. And the more streams, the merrier.

Another development that should give us pause: Blackboard has teamed up with NBC to include "building block" tools for using news broadcasts in courses—content that is paid for separately. In the press release, a faculty member is quoted as saying, "I previously struggled to bring real time, real world content into the classroom and I'm hoping the NBC Learn Archives can help change that."

Um, why don't you see if your library can't help change that? It doesn't make sense for an institution to subscribe to a limited stream of content that gets locked into single courses through a proprietary system, not when you have a library that is meant to provide you with resources. Yet with materials bundled into password-protected textbook sites and packages intended to plug into course management systems, the library is being bypassed. Why?

Creating common ground

So here's my modest manifesto: We must position ourselves as the champions of students and faculty and their right to read and learn without the hindrances and barriers built into commercial products that are trying to cash in on artificially-created information shortages.

That's the fundamental idea of a library—to provide access, to lower barriers, to be the advocate for the researcher who needs information or the student who wants to learn. If we could help close the loop between producing knowledge and sharing it, maybe we could redirect our funding to better effect.

Here's an example: Utah State University Press is the latest to merge the press into the library and make important monographs available online, with print available on demand, following in the footsteps of the National Academies Press, Penn State's Romance Studies series, the University of Michigan Press, Rice University Press, and others.

Admittedly, Utah's situation has been a merger born of desperation, and as Sandy Thatcher points out, quality publishing, even without traditional printing and distribution methods, requires serious up-front cost. Hoping that sale of printed copies will somehow pay the bills won't work. Higher education needs to invest at the front end. Then we'd be less at the mercy of profit margins when we have to buy our scholarship back. We could redraft our contract with society that we provide a public good.

Does this mean taking money from acquisitions budgets and redirecting it to allied non-profit publishing? Yes, that's what I'm saying. And yes, that would mean massive realignment, both for libraries and university presses.

But libraries and non-profit scholarly publishers do many of the same things—we select, curate, and make high quality information available to readers and researchers. There have to be ways to do these things more effectively and efficiently together.