Fantasy Prices and Secret Deals | Peer to Peer Review
By Barbara Fister, Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN Jun 24, 2010Let's stop managing budgets with imaginary numbers.
A post from the Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics got me thinking about how we can use financial crises to face problems that were merely irritants in the past?but how lack of transparency makes it hard to assess value. In her post, Heather Morrison analyzed the cost-effectiveness of scholarly journals that are non-profit and simply try to cover their costs and those that are for-profit. When we see price increases, she cautions us not to jump to conclusions but rather to think about the actual dollars involved and whether it's warranted. (This is a useful reminder for those who were so leery of numbers that we took Elementary Logic to fulfill their undergraduate math requirement.) For comparison's sake she used Emerald's Library Management ($14,600) and the more prestigious College & Research Libraries ($80).
Bernd-Christoph Kaempe of Stuttgart University objected that nobody pays the full price for Emerald journals, and if someone did, they goofed; they should cancel their subscriptions immediately and start fresh. Subscribing to a package from Emerald is actually cheaper than subscribing to a single title. As he put it, "single title prices with Emerald are fantasy prices." Perhaps the strategy is to cut a package deal while librarians are still in a state of sticker shock. It's a sign of how Byzantine our negotiations can be.
Let me give you a deal on that
The "list price" issue also came up when Nature Publishing Group (NPG) defended its proposed price increase for the University of California (UC) system. The objections were generally along the lines of "whaddya mean, their 80 percent discount is subsidized by other institutions that pay list price? Nobody pays list." (Well, actually, you do if you can't afford a site license and buy a print subscription. But I digress.)
The slippery nature of numbers we're dealing with is frustrating, as is the secrecy enshrouding prices, a lack of transparency that the Association of Research Libraries protested a year ago when it recommended that members refrain from signing nondisclosure agreements to encourage research into pricing and to create healthier market conditions. One of the odd aspects of the UC/NPG dispute is that NPG officials were affronted that confidential discussions were leaked; UC responded that it had to discuss the problem with faculty, who are key stakeholders.
Responsible libraries don't make decisions in a vacuum. Given the UC system is a large public institution, it's not possible to swear all stakeholders to secrecy. And why should decisions about investing large amounts of public dollars be shielded from public scrutiny, anyway?
It's disturbing when publishers appeal to the courts to block citizens from examining public records. Luckily, courts in the State of Washington ruled against Elsevier when it complained that revealing the price the University of Washington had paid for a package would "disclose aspects of Elsevier's pricing methods and formula so as to produce private gain and public loss."
Public loss? Oh, please.
Doing the numbers
Apart from the transparency problem, trying to make decisions with such fuzzy numbers is difficult. I admit I took the Elementary Logic loophole as an undergrad, but trying to determine the value of a particular journal in this environment is an equation that would be challenging even to the mathematically inclined. To make a decision about whether to drop a title?and we're all making those decisions?you have to do something like this:
((bundle n / total number of titles in bundle) * price increase) / use
. . . where n= "secretly negotiated price" and use must be weighted by misleading impact factors and faculty whims.
It's hard enough to broker decisions with stakeholders without having to work with fantasy numbers and secret formulas, but there is one benefit to hard times: what we've considered untouchable but an obscene waste of resources is now on the table. And we're desperate enough to question the rules by which we've been forced to play.
Rebooting the disciplines
Dan Wallach of Rice University offers an interesting clean slate solution. He writes bluntly that the publication process in the field of computer science is broken, and then he counts the ways. Acceptance rates at the most significant conferences are around ten percent. Rejected papers go looking for other homes, burdening reviewers. Publication latency means a manuscript might be scooped before it finally gets in print. And there's an incentive to rehash the same ideas in multiple papers instead of concentrating on one or two groundbreaking publications. Variant online versions lead to confused citations and inaccurate citation counts. Every discipline is different, but promotion and tenure committee members often assume that what counts as a significant achievement in their field is universal. And oh yes, there's cost. He writes:
Our library has been slowly dropping its journal subscriptions. Even without receiving printed paper journals, online access for our campus to major journals can cost thousands of dollars per year per journal title! Given that all of the relevant labor in writing and reviewing papers is "donated" by the authors and reviewers, why aren't these publications available free of cost? They can and should be.
Aw, that's so cute.
He goes on to sketch out a technical framework for a system that would allow authors to submit and store papers (like arXiv) with functions for searching, citing, and tracking citations to papers (like Google Scholar, but better). Authors would supply their own keywords as well as a standard taxonomy already in use in the field. Papers (whether conference presentations, technical reports, or published journal articles) could be included. Because it would be easier to see which papers are being read and cited, authors would be able to put more work into a single high-impact publication rather than thinly slice research in order to have as many publications as possible. There would be new ways to add links among ideas, and to provide a secure home for concepts that may be ahead of their time; they can sit there, ignored, until the field catches up. Wallach acknowledges there are still kinks to be worked out, but it's an interesting exploration of how to "reboot" a discipline's scholarly process.
Nudging tradition
Though the notion of what matters is evolving in every discipline, the stakes are so high that faculty tend to stick to tradition to be on the safe side. In Wallach's field, conference presentation has high prestige; in history, the monograph published by a respected university press has always been proof of a scholar's value. But that may be changing. This month, three history associations endorsed a statement on how tenure and promotion committees could recognize new forms of scholarship in the area of public history or other areas where traditional publication is not the only scholarly product that has value. The report states, "creating equitable ways to assess and credit publicly engaged and collaborative research will not only benefit public historians; such an effort can encourage all interested scholars to pursue such projects with the confidence that their hard work will be rewarded."
That makes sense to me. And if numbers of publications and impact factors were no longer the only fuzzy and flawed metric by which a scholar's worth is assessed, we'd have fewer imaginary numbers, fantasy prices, and secrets to keep. The math would get a whole lot simpler. And, as a humanities major, I approve.
Barbara Fister is a librarian at Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN, a contributor to ACRLog, and an author of crime fiction. Her latest mystery, Through the Cracks (see review), has just been published by Minotaur Books.
