The University Library: Closing the Book

At the memorial service, the eulogies expressed deep sadness at the loss of a great institution, once a cornerstone of academia. Everyone blamed The Shelfless Revolution for this sad death. In fact, The University Library had been weak for a long time, and it could not survive any shock.

The Transition from Print to Digital

The transition from print to digital was swift, particularly for scholarly journals. In the 1990s, The University Library, publishers, and the middlemen of the supply chain ramped up their IT infrastructure and adapted their business relationships. The switch to digital was achieved quickly and with little interruption.

Print vs. Digital Lending

Lending books and journals, whether print or digital, is a high overhead enterprise. Since print and digital lending involve different kinds of work, it is obvious that their overheads are quantitatively different. It is less obvious and easily ignored that they are qualitatively different: Print overhead is an investment. Digital overhead is waste.

Consider print lending. The overhead builds a valuable collection housed in community-owned real estate. Barring disasters, the value of the collection and the infrastructure increases over time. The cumulative effect is most obvious in old libraries, which are showcases of accumulated treasure.

Contrast this with digital lending. Digital overhead pays for short-term operational expenses to acquire site licenses whose value is zero when they expire. Even infrastructure spending has only short-term benefits. Computing and networking hardware must be replaced every few years. Site-licensed software to manage the digital lending library, like site licenses for content, have zero value upon expiration.

The digital lending library never accumulates value. It does not contribute anything to future generations. It only provides services here and now. It just needs to perform current responsibilities in a cost effective manner. Evaluating The University Library as a digital lender boiled down to a few simple questions: Was The University Library a cost-effective negotiator and content provider? Did it provide a user friendly service? Could others do better?

The Ineffective Negotiator

While other publishers suffered years of disruption and catastrophic downsizing, scholarly publishers thrived throughout the digital revolution and afterwards. Their profit margins remained sky high. Their new business model was even better than the old. By selling site licenses, they retained control of the content forever. New content provided an immediate revenue stream, and accumulated old content ensured an ever increasing future revenue stream.

The University Library was a predictable customer with a budget that kept pace with inflation. Not satisfied with this, publishers increased their prices at a rate well above inflation. Every so often, The University Library and its funders pressed the panic button. This would start a round of negotiations. Librarians were caught between scholars who wanted to maximize content and administrators who wanted to reduce costs. They negotiated with publishers, each of whom had a monopoly over their island of the literature. Predictably, most negotiations ended with some performative cutbacks by The University Library and a few temporary price concessions by the publishers. Then, the cycle started all over again.

The Market Distorter

The University Library distorted the scholarly communication market, merely by being present in it. Normal economic forces did not apply.

To maintain quality, The University Library acquired content from publishers with a track record. The barriers against new unproven publishers created an oligarchy of publishers that kept prices artificially high.

The University Library also eliminated competition between established publishers. Imagine two competing journals, A and B. A survey among the relevant scholars reveals that 60% prefer A, 40% prefer B, and 20% adamantly insist that they need both A and B. The University Library had no choice but to license both journals for all scholars. By erasing individual preferences, it eliminated competition.

For most textbooks, publishers knew well in advance how many copies The University Library would buy. Given this information, publishers inflated their textbook prices to a level where library sales covered their production costs. All other sales were pure profit from a riskless enterprise.

Providing Access

Under the terms of the site licenses, only authorized users were allowed access, and systematic downloading was prohibited. It was the responsibility of The University Library to protect the content against inappropriate users and use. This work on behalf of publishers was a significant part of digital overhead paid for by The University Library.

Aside from being costly, access controls inconvenienced users. Links to content might stop working without notice because of miscommunication between publishers and library systems. When visiting another campus or when changing jobs, scholars had to adapt to new user interfaces. What had been an asset in the print era, a library built for a local community, had become a liability in the digital era.

Personal Digital Libraries

In their personal lives, scholars subscribed to online newspapers and magazines, to movie and music streaming services, and to various social networks where they posted and consumed content. They easily managed these personal subscriptions. What was so different about scholarly subscriptions? What exactly did The University Library do that they could not do themselves faster and more efficiently?

The University Library no longer accumulated long-term value. It was an ineffective negotiator unable to control costs. It blocked competition from new publishers. It eliminated competition between established publishers. It spent considerable overhead to control access on behalf of publishers while inconveniencing users.

The Shelfless Revolution changed all that. Overnight, scholars were in charge of acquiring their own information needs. During the initial period of chaos, scholars were forced to subscribe to each journal individually. Publishers quickly adapted by bundling books and journals into various packages. Third-party service providers, working with all publishers, offered custom personal libraries. The undergraduate pre-med student who loved mystery novels and the assistant professor in chemistry who hiked wilderness trails no longer shared the same library. Their competing interests no longer needed to be balanced.

Many journals did not survive the suddenly competitive market. With fewer journals, publishing a paper became more competitive. Over time, the typical scholar published fewer papers of higher quality. With fewer opportunities to publish in classical peer-reviewed journals, scholars had an incentive to create and/or try out new forms of scholarly communication.

Sticky Digital Lending

Looking back, it is difficult to grasp how controversial a step it was to switch to personal libraries.

Before The Shelfless Revolution, academic administrators would have committed career suicide if they proposed such an outrageous idea. The backlash would have been harsh and immediate. The opposition message would have written itself: They are outsourcing The University Library to the publishers who have been extorting the scholarly community for years. This slogan would have had the benefit of being true. The counterargument would have been the idea that publishers lose their price-setting power when scholars make their own individual purchasing decisions. While standard capitalist theory, the idea was untested in scholarly communication.

The unlikely university where the faculty approved the outrageous proposal would be mired in endless debate. How should the library subscription budget be divided? How much should go to undergraduate students? to graduate students? to postdocs? to faculty? Should they receive these funds in the form of tuition rebates and salary increases or in the form of university accounts? What would be allowable purchases on such accounts?

No single university could have implemented such a change on its own. Accreditation authorities would have expressed doubts or outright opposition. Publishers would not have changed their business models to accommodate one university. It would have required a large coalition of universities.

It took a catastrophic shock to the system, The Shelfless Revolution, to cut this Gordian knot.

Open Access

Many years before The Shelfless Revolution, a few academics started a project to kickstart a revolution in scholarly communication. As this grew into The Open Access Movement, The University Library was called upon to support some of the infrastructure. Many librarians considered this a promising opportunity for a digital future.

The Open Access Movement coalesced around three goals: Provide free access to scholarly works, Reduce the cost of scholarly communication, and Create innovative forms of scholarly communication.

The first goal was quite successful. Three mechanisms were developed to provide free access to scholarly works: institutional repositories, disciplinary repositories, and open access journals. The University Library was primarily responsible for institutional repositories, which contained author-formatted versions of conventionally published papers, unpublished technical reports, theses and dissertations, data sets, and other scholarly material. Several groups of scholars developed disciplinary repositories to collect works in specific areas of research and make them freely available. Finally, various entities created open access journals, which relied on alternative funding mechanisms and did not charge subscription fees.

The second goal, reducing the cost of scholarly communication, was an utter failure. The Open Access Movement had assumed that making a large part of the scholarly literature available for free would put downward pressure on the price of subscription journals. This assumption was proved wrong. Scholars continued to publish in the same journals. The familiar cycle of site license price increases and performative negotiations continued. Repositories were never a threat. Open-access journals were never competition.

Institutional repositories were particularly valuable for scholarly works that were previously hard to find, such as theses, technical reports, data, etc. For author-formatted papers, they evolved into a costly backup for conventional scholarly publishing. They provided a valuable service for those without access to journals. Most scholars would not risk their research by relying on pre-published unofficial versions, and they required the version of record. Besides, repositories were too cumbersome to use.

Disciplinary repositories were more user friendly, but they needed outside funding. Occasionally, the priorities of the funders would change, and the repository would have to find a new source for funding. Each funding crisis was an opportunity for publishers to buy the repository. To keep the repository under scholars’ control, an interested government agency or philanthropic organization had to step forward every time. To control the repository, publishers had to be lucky just once.

Open access journals just increased the number of scholarly journals. Subscription journals did not suddenly fail because of competing open access journals. At most, subscription journals responded by introducing an open access option. Authors could choose to pay a fee to put their papers outside of the paywall. These authors just trusted publishers not to include these open access papers in the calculation of subscription prices. The publisher’s promise was impossible to verify. This was the level of dysfunction of the scholarly communication market at that time.

The University Library paid ever increasing prices for site licenses and their maintenance. It also paid for the maintenance of institutional repositories. Government and philanthropic funding agencies paid for disciplinary repositories. Scholars used a combination of library funding, research accounts, departmental accounts, and personal resources to pay for open access charges. The scholarly community was spending more than ever on scholarly communication, and no one knew how much.

The Open Access Movement also failed to deliver on its third goal, innovations in scholarly communication. Early stage ventures were too risky for responsible organizations like The University Library. Most ideas failed or remained unexecuted. The Shelfless Revolution changed the environment. Individual scholars in charge of their own budget and confronted with the actual costs of scholarly communication were willing to fund risky but promising experiments.

The Fallout

The Shelfless Revolution killed the digital lending library. This started a chain reaction that affected every service offered by The University Library.

It was immediately obvious that archives had to survive. The print archive was scanned and stored in repositories. In spite of their limitations, repositories became the primary portal into the print archive. Print volumes became museum artifacts virtually untouched by humans. The digital archive mostly contains university-owned scholarly material. Copyright issues created too many obstacles to archive publisher-owned content. New legislative proposals would put the burden on publishers to preserve digital collections of significant cultural, scientific, and/or historical value. This is similar to how we treat protected historical buildings. Publishers will have to store such digital collections in audited standardized archives with government-backed protections against all kinds of calamity.

Print lending died out when most books contained multimedia illustrations and interactive components. Print material of historical importance was moved from the lending library to the nonlending print archive. This killed interlibrary loan services of printed material. Digital interlibrary loans all but disappeared with custom personal libraries.

After losing collection development staff, the reference desk could no longer cover a broad cross-section of scholarly disciplines. It got caught in a downward spiral of decreasing usefulness and declining use.

Long ago, librarians controlled what information was readily available. As technology advanced, their gatekeeping power evaporated. They still nudged publishers towards quality using the power of the purse. This too is now gone. The battle against disinformation seems lost. The profound political differences on where fighting disinformation ends and censorship begins are nowhere near being resolved.

After wreaking havoc on public school libraries, The University Library was braced against attempts at censorship. Before it could engage in that fight, The Shelfless Revolution happened. The switch to personal digital libraries reduced the political heat as universities no longer directly paid for controversial content. Censorship lost the battle, but The University Library lost the war.

Thousands of library projects got caught in the turmoil. Some survived by being moved to other organizations. Most did not. We will never know how much destruction was caused by The Shelfless Revolution.

Conclusion

The University Library made all the right moves. It embraced new technology. It executed the transition from print to digital without major disruption. It was open to new opportunities.

Yet, things went wrong. Open access repositories were supposed to be subversive weapons. Open access journals were supposed to be deadly competitors. Instead, they turned out to be paper tigers, powerless against the oligarchy of the scholarly communication market.

Publishers of newspapers, magazines, music, and video barely survived the disruptive transition to digital. As they rebuilt their businesses from the ruins, they developed business models for the new reality. In contrast, the smooth transition of the scholarly communication market protected existing organizations. It also perpetuated the flaws of old business models, and it let the distorted market grow more dysfunctional every day.

With the benefit of hindsight, the necessary changes could have been implemented more humanely. This was never a realistic option, however. The chaotic and disruptive change of The Shelfless Revolution was inevitable.





#scholcomm #AcademicTwitter #ScienceTwitter #scicomm

Simpler Times

“The Library of Congress is worried about the exponential growth of the number of journals. By 2025, their shelves will fill up faster than the speed of light. However, a professor of physics assured them there was no problem: exceeding the speed of light is allowed when no information is transmitted.” 

There are references to variations of this joke as far back as 1971. I first heard it in 1983 or 1984, when I was a graduate student. This is how I learned that some academics were concerned about the state of scholarly communication.

In simpler times, the values of publishing and scholarship were well aligned. The number of slots in respected journals was extremely limited, and fierce competition for those slots raised the quality and substance of papers. As publishers became more efficient and savvy, they created more journals and accepted more papers. Scholars competing in the academic job market were always eager to contribute ever more papers. As scholars published more, hiring committees demanded more. A vicious cycle with no end in sight.

It is doubtful that the typical scholar of 2016 produces more good ideas than the typical scholar of 1956. The former certainly writes a lot more papers than the latter. The publish-or-perish culture reduced the scholarly paper to a least publishable unit. The abundance of brain sneeze is correlated with several other issues. Many reported results cannot be reproduced. [A Joke Syllabus With a Serious Point: Cussing Away the Reproducibility Crisis] A growing number of papers are retracted for fraud and serious errors. [Retraction Watch] Clinical trials are hidden when they do not have the desired results. [AllTrials] Fake journals scam honest-but-naive scholars, embellish the scholarly records of fraudulent scholars, and/or provide the sheen of legitimacy to bad research. [Beall's List]

This race to the bottom was financed by universities through their libraries. Every year, they paid higher subscription prices to more journals. In the 1990s, library budgets spiraled out of control and finally caught the attention of university administrators. This was also when the internet grew exponentially. Scholars who realized the web's potential demanded barrier-free online access to research. The Open Access (OA) movement was born.

Good scholarship is elitist: we expect scholars to gain status and influence for getting it right, particularly when they had to fight against majority opinion. Journals are essential components in the arbitration of this elitism. Yet, even well before the OA movement, it was in the publishers' interest to lower the barriers of publishing: every published paper incentivizes its authors to lobby their institutions in favor of a journal subscription.

Gold OA journals [Directory of Open Access Journals] with business models that do not rely on subscription revenue made the problem worse. They were supposed to kill and replace subscription journals. Instead, subscription journals survived virtually intact. Subscriptions did not disappear. Their impact factors did not fall even after competing Gold OA journals scaled the impact-factor ladder. The net result of Gold OA is more opportunities to publish in high-impact-factor journals.

The Green OA strategy had a plausible path to reverse the growth of journals: libraries might be able to drop some subscriptions if scholars should shift their use to Green OA institutional repositories (IRs). [OAI Registered Data Providers] This outcome now seems unlikely. I previously argued that IRs are obsolete, and that the Green OA strategy needs social networks that create a network effect by serving individual scholars, not their institutions. [Let IR RIP] In an excellent response by Poynder and Lynch [Q&A with CNI’s Clifford Lynch: Time to re-think the institutional repository?], we learned how some academic libraries are contracting with Elsevier to manage their IRs. They seem to have given up on Green OA as a strategy to reclaim ownership of the scholarly literature from publishers. They have pivoted their IRs towards a different and equally important goal: increasing the visibility and accessibility of theses, archives, technical papers, lab notebooks, oral histories, etc.

The OA movement tried to accomplish meaningful change of the scholarly-communication system with incremental steps that preserve continuity. I called it isentropic disruption. [Isentropic Disruption] However, scholarly publishers have proven extra-ordinarily immune to any pressure. Just the transition to digital wiped out every other kind of publisher. Scholarly publishers did not even change their business model. They also brushed off reproducibility and fraud scandals. They survived boycotts and editorial-board resignations. They largely ignored Green and Gold OA. Perhaps, the OA movement just needs more time. Perhaps, the OA movement is falling victim to a sunk-cost fallacy.

The current system is financially not sustainable and, worse, is bad for scholarship. Within the shared-governance structure of universities, it is virtually impossible to take disruptive action in the absence of immediate crisis. Universities tend to postpone such decisions until no alternative remains. Then, they inflict maximum pain by implementing unplanned change overnight.

Yet, there are options available right now. With time to plan a transition, there would be much less collateral damage. For example, I proposed replacing library site licenses with personal subscriptions to iTunes-like services for academics. [Where the Puck won't be] Personal digital libraries would be much easier to use than the current site-licensed monstrosities. With scholars as direct customers, the market for these services would be extremely competitive. By configuring and using their personal library, scholars would create market-driven limits on the number of available publication slots. Those willing to consider out-of-the-box crazy approaches can even achieve such limits within an OA context. [Market Capitalism and Open Access]

Academics created the problem. Only academics can solve it. Not libraries. Not publishers. Digital journals are already filling the virtual shelves at the speed of light... The punch line of the joke is in sight.

Let IR RIP

The Institutional Repository (IR) is obsolete. Its flawed foundation cannot be repaired. The IR must be phased out and replaced with viable alternatives.

Lack of enthusiasm. The number of IRs has grown because of a few motivated faculty and administrators. After twenty years of promoting IRs, there is no grassroots support. Scholars submit papers to an IR because they have to, not because they want to. Too few IR users become recruiters. There is no network effect.

Local management. At most institutions, the IR is created to support an Open Access (OA) mandate. As part of the necessary approval and consensus-building processes, various administrative and faculty committees impose local rules and exemptions. After launch, the IR is managed by an academic library accountable only to current faculty. Local concerns dominate those of the worldwide community of potential users.

Poor usability. Access-, copy-, reuse, and data-mining rights are overly restrictive or left unstated. Content consists of a mishmash of formats. The resulting federation of IRs is useless for serious research. Even the most basic queries cannot be implemented reliably. National IRs (like PubMed) and disciplinary repositories (like ArXiv) eliminate local idiosyncrasies and are far more useful. IRs were supposed to duplicate their success, while spreading the financial burden and immunizing the system against adverse political decisions. The sacrifice in usability is too high a price to pay.

Low use. Digital information improves with use. Unused, it remains stuck in obsolete formats. After extended non-use, recovering information requires a digital version of archaeology. Every user of a digital archive participates in its crowd-sourced quality control. Every access is an opportunity to discover, report, and repair problems. To succeed at its archival mission, a digital archive must be an essential research tool that all scholars need every day.

High cost. Once upon a time, the IR was a cheap experiment. Today's professionally managed IR costs far too much for its limited functionality.

Fragmented control. Over the course of their careers, most scholars are affiliated with several institutions. It is unreasonable to distribute a scholar's work according to where it was produced. At best, it is inconvenient to maintain multiple accounts. At worst, it creates long-term chaos to comply with different and conflicting policies of institutions with which one is no longer affiliated. In a cloud-computing world, scholars should manage their own personal repositories, and archives should manage the repositories of scholars no longer willing or able.

Social interaction. Research is a social endeavor. [Creating Knowledge] Let us be inspired by the titans of the network effect: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, etc. Encourage scholars to build their personal repository in a social-network context. Disciplinary repositories like ArXiv and SSRN can expand their social-network services. Social networks like Academia.edu, Mendeley, Zotero, and Figshare have the capability to implement and/or expand IR-like services.

Distorted market. Academic libraries are unlikely to spend money on services that compete with IRs. Ventures that bypass libraries must offer their services for free. In desperation, some have pursued (and dropped) controversial alternative methods of monetizing their services. [Scholars Criticize Academia.edu Proposal to Charge Authors for Recommendations]

Many academics are suspicious of any commercial interests in scholarly communication. Blaming publishers for the scholarly-journal crisis, they conveniently forget their own contribution to the dysfunction. Willing academics, with enthusiastic help from publishers, launch ever more journals.[Hitler, Mother Teresa, and Coke] They also pressure libraries to site license "their" journals, giving publishers a strong negotiation position. Without library-paid site licenses, academics would have flocked to alternative publishing models, and publishers would have embraced alternative subscription plans like an iTunes for scholarly papers. [Where the Puck won't be] [What if Libraries were the Problem?] Universities and/or governments must change how they fund scholarly communication to eliminate the marketplace distortions that preserve the status quo, protect publishers, and stifle innovation. In a truly open market of individual subscriptions, start-up ventures would thrive.

I believed in IRs. I advocated for IRs. After participating in the First Meeting of the Open Archives Initiative (1999, Santa Fe, New Mexico), I started a project that would evolve into Caltech CODA. [The Birth of the Open Access Movement] We encouraged, then required, electronic theses. We captured preprints and historical documents. [E-Journals: Do-It-Yourself Publishing]

I was convinced IRs would disrupt scholarly communication. I was wrong. All High Energy Physics (HEP) papers are available in ArXiv. Being a disciplinary repository, ArXiv functions like an idealized version of a federation of IRs. It changed scholarly communication for the better by speeding up dissemination and improving social interaction, but it did not disrupt. On the contrary, HEP scholars organized what amounted to an an authoritarian take-over of the HEP scholarly-journal marketplace. While ensuring open access of all HEP research, this take-over also cemented the status quo for the foreseeable future. [A Physics Experiment] 

The IR is not equivalent with Green Open Access. The IR is only one possible implementation of Green OA. With the IR at a dead end, Green OA must pivot towards alternatives that have viable paths forward: personal repositories, disciplinary repositories, social networks, and innovative combinations of all three.

*Edited 7/26/2016 to correct formatting errors.

MOOCs Teach OA a Lesson

Just four years ago, Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) were tentative experiments promoted by a handful of professors. (Wikipedia, New York Times, Chronicle of Higher Education) Today, universities across the world are rushing in, and millions of students are enrolling. Contrast this with the Open Access movement (OA). More than twenty years after the introduction of the hep-th database (which became arXiv), OA remains a struggle. There have been significant OA advances, but universal open access to the scholarly literature remains a distant promise, probably requiring many more years.

Why did OA never reach the kind of momentum MOOCs seem to have?

Because successful MOOCs serve many thousands of students, their per-student costs are extremely low when compared to traditional teaching. Yet, the cost of producing a series of high-quality large-scale interactive multimedia events is significant. Compared with MOOCs, the start-up cost of OA is almost negligible. After an institutional repository is set up, the only barrier to OA is a few key strokes per scholarly paper.

Why were academic leaders so concerned about the minimal costs of OA? Why are they not concerned about the far more significant costs of MOOCs?

MOOCs have the potential of disrupting thousands of teaching positions. MOOCs are a threat to admissions offices and a system of university reputations based on rejection rates. On the other hand, universal OA would primarily disrupt libraries, publishers, and their middlemen, not academics. Yet, academic leaders are enamored with MOOCs, and they treat OA like a chore for which there is always some excuse to postpone. If MOOCs really prove to be as disruptive as hoped or feared, they figure it is preferable to be on the side of the disrupters.

Why do academic leaders not make the same calculation with respect to OA? Why do they fear the potential of OA-caused disruption? Why do they embrace the potential of MOOCs-caused disruption?

In my search for answers, I arrived at four tentative conjectures.

Conjecture 1. MOOCs are in their infancy. The wave of initial excitement will pass, and the hard MOOC work lies ahead. OA is further along in its evolution. Passed its own wave of initial excitement, OA is now in the slow process of building its infrastructure. Some form of OA will soon emerge as the inevitable path.

This conjecture provides cover to continue on the current path.

Conjecture 2. With MOOCs, first movers have a clear advantage. They have the most time to develop the know-how for producing successful MOOCs. With little competition, they can afford to make mistakes and learn from them. With OA, first movers provide a service to those on the sidelines and get little in return. (This perverse incentive explains, in part, the need for OA mandates.)

This begs for initiatives that reward scholars who make their works OA.

Conjecture 3. With MOOCs, faculty control their work, and they do what they do best: they innovate an area in which they are experts. OA feels like an external imposition. To add insult to injury, some repository managers have turned simple light-weight OA repositories into a bureaucratic mess with useless policies that turn faculty off. And it is not just repository policies. Scholars are increasingly awash in conflicting and confusing OA-related policies from funding agencies, publishers, universities, and libraries. Discussions about OA mandates do not help the cause either. It is irrelevant that OA mandates require very little effort when enacted; the discussion itself is a turn-off.

This is an argument to reduce the heavy-handedness of current OA approaches. Eliminate the bureaucracy, and replace institutional repositories with self-managed individual repositories. These may not eliminate all institutional policies, but they give scholars a greater degree of control and flexibility. Individual repositories are also portable when scholars move from one institution to the next. There are at least two options that make it easy for scholars to manage their own individual repository: academia.edu and myopenarchive.org. ORCID, the recently launched initiative to manage the identities of scholars, could also evolve into a system of individual repositories.

Conjecture 4. OA is not sufficiently disruptive. Hoping to minimize resistance to OA, OA advocates tend to underemphasize the disruptiveness of OA. Gold and Green OA leave the scholarly-communication system essentially intact. When presented in a minimalist frame, they are minor tweaks that provide open access, shift costs, and bend the cost curve. Such modest, even boring, goals do not capture the imagination of the most effective advocates for change, advocates who have the ears of and who are courted by academic leaders: venture capitalists. This is a constituency that seeks out projects that change the world.

This conjecture is an argument to pursue disruptive OA. What if OA completely erased the cost of all scholarly communication? That would reduce the cost of education and/or research by at least as much as some of the most disruptive MOOC scenarios.

PeerJ falls in the category of disruptive OA. PeerJ is a new model for open-access journals with peer review. PeerJ charges authors a one-time $99 membership fee and eliminates the per-paper publication charges of Gold OA journals.

One could, of course, dispose of journals altogether. Combine individual repositories with open evaluation and alternative metrics. The field of altmetrics has developed various impact measures based on usage statistics of individual papers. This fine-grained analysis is far superior to the rather coarse and often misleading Journal Impact Factor. To succeed, open evaluation and altmetrics must win over the entrenched interests that control academia's prestige machine.

Perhaps, none of these conjectures fully explain differing attitudes towards MOOCs and OA. Perhaps, it is a combination of all four. Perhaps, there are other factors at play. If so, what are they, and how should those factors influence our approach to OA?

The Day After

On Sunday, the Open Access petition to the White House reached the critical number of 25,000 signatures: President Obama will take a stand on the issue. Yesterday was Open Access Monday, a time to celebrate an important milestone. Today is a time for libraries to reflect on their new role in a post-site-licensed world.

Imagine success beyond all expectations: The President endorses Open Access. There is bipartisan support in Congress. Open Access to government-sponsored research is enacted. The proposal seeks only Green Open Access: the deposit in an open repository of scholarly articles that are also conventionally published. With similar legislation being enacted world-wide, imagine all scholarly publishers deciding that the best way forward for them is to convert all journals to the Gold Open Access model. In this model, authors or their institutions pay publishing costs up front to publish scholarly articles under an open license.

Virtually overnight, universal Open Access is a reality.

9:00am

When converting to Gold Open Access, publishers replace site-license revenue with author-paid page charges. They use data from the old business model to estimate revenue-neutral page charges. The estimate is a bit rough, but as long as scholars keep publishing at the same rate and in the same journals as before, the initial revenue from page charges should be comparable to that from site licenses. Eventually, the market will settle around a price point influenced by the real costs of open-access publishing, by publishing behavior of scholars who must pay to get published, and by publishers deciding to get in or get out of the scholarly-information market.

10:00am

Universities re-allocate the libraries' site-license budgets and create accounts to pay for author page charges. Most universities assign the management of these accounts to academic departments, which are in the best position to monitor expenses charged by faculty.

11:00am

Publishers make redundant their sales teams catering to libraries. They cancel vendor exhibits at library conferences. They terminate all agreements with journal aggregators and other intermediaries between libraries and publishers.

12:00pm

Libraries eliminate electronic resource management, which includes everything involved in the acquisition and maintenance of site licenses. No more tracking of site licenses. No more OpenURL servers. No more proxy servers. No more cataloging electronic journals. No more maintaining databases of journals licensed by the library.

1:00pm

For publishers, the editorial boards and the authors they attract are more important than ever. These scholars have always created the core product from which publishers derived their revenue streams. Now, these same scholars, not intermediaries like libraries and journal aggregators, are the direct source of the revenue. Publishers expand the marketing teams that target faculty and students. They also strengthen the teams that develop editorial boards.

2:00pm

Publishers' research portals like Elsevier's Scopus start incorporating full-text scholarly output from all of their competitors.

Scholarly societies provide specialized digital libraries for every niche imaginable.

Some researchers develop research tools that data mine the open scholarly literature. They create startup ventures and commercialize these tools.

Google Scholar and Microsoft Academic Search each announce comprehensive academic search engines that have indexed the full text of the available open scholarly literature.

3:00pm

While some journal aggregators go out of business, others retool and develop researcher-oriented products.

ISI's World of Knowledge, EBSCO,  OCLC, and others create research portals catering to individual researchers. Of course, these new portals incorporate full-text papers, not just abstracts or catalog records.

Overnight, full-text scholarly search turned into a competitive market. Developing viable business models proves difficult, because juggernauts Google and MicroSoft are able to provide excellent search services for free. Strategic alliances are formed.

4:00pm

No longer tied to their institutions' libraries by site licenses, researchers use whichever is the best research portal for each particular purpose. Web sites of academic libraries experience a steep drop-off in usage. The number of interlibrary loan requests tumbles: only requests for nondigital archival works remain.

5:00pm

Libraries lose funding for those institutional repositories that duplicate scholarly research available through Gold Open Access. Faculty are no longer interested in contributing to these repositories, and university administrators do not want to pay for this duplication.

Moral

By just about any measure, this outcome would be far superior to the current state of scholarly publishing. Scholars, researchers, professionals in any discipline, students, businesses, and the general population would benefit from access to original scholarship unfettered by pay walls. The economic benefit of commercializing research faster would be immense. Tuition increases may not be as steep because of savings in the library budget.

If librarians fear a steadily diminishing role for academic libraries (and they should), they must make a compelling value proposition for the post-site-licensed world now. The only choice available is to be disruptive or to be disrupted. The no-disruption option is not available. Libraries can learn from Harvard Business School Professor Clayton M. Christensen, who has analyzed scores of disrupted industries. They can learn from the edX project or Udacity, major initiatives of large-scale online teaching. These projects are designed to disrupt the business model of the very institutions that incubated them. But if they succeed, they will be the disrupting force. Those on the sidelines will be the disrupted victims.

Libraries have organized or participated in Open Access discussions, meetings, negotiations, petitions, boycotts... Voluntary submission to institutional repositories has been proven insufficient. Enforced open-access mandates are a significant improvement. Yet, open-access mandates are not a destination. They are, at most, a strategy for creating change. The current scholarly communication system, even if complemented with open repositories that cover 100% of the scholarly literature, is hopelessly out of step with current technology and society.

In the words of Andy Grove, former chairman and chief executive officer of Intel: “To understand a company’s strategy, look at what they actually do rather than what they say they will do.” Ultimately, only actions that involve significant budget reallocations are truly credible. As long as pay walls are the dominant item in library budgets, libraries retain the organizational structure appropriate for a site-licensed world. As long as pay-wall management dominates the libraries' day-to-day operations, libraries hire, develop, and promote talent for a site-licensed world. This is a recipe for success for only one scenario: the status-quo.