Forward to the Past

What will academic libraries look like in 2050?

In the early days of the web, librarians had to fight back against the notion that libraries would soon be obsolete. They had solid arguments. Information literacy would become more important. Archiving and managing information would become more difficult. In fact, academic libraries saw an opportunity to increase their role on campus. This opportunity did not materialize. Libraries remain stuck in a horseless-carriage era. They added an IT department. They made digital copies of existing paper services. They continued their existing business relationships with publishers and various intermediaries. They ignored the lessons of the web-connected knowledge economy. Thriving organizations create virtuous cycles of abundance by solving hard problems: better solutions, more users, more revenue, more content, more expertise, and better solutions.

Academic libraries seem incapable of escaping commodity-service purgatory, even when tackling their most ambitious projects. They are eager to manage data archives, but the paper-archive model produces an undifferentiated commodity preservation service. A more appropriate model would be the US National Virtual Astronomical Observatory, where preservation is a happy side effect of extracting maximum research out of existing data. Data archives should be centers of excellence. They focus on a specific field. They are operated by researchers who keep abreast of the latest developments, who adapt data sets to evolving best practices, who make data sets interoperable, who search for inconsistencies between different studies, who detect, flag, and correct errors, and who develop increasingly sophisticated services.

No university can take a center-of-excellence approach to data archiving for every field in which it is active. No archive serving just one university can grow to a sufficiently large scale for excellence. Each field has different needs. How many centers does the field need? How should centers divide the work? What are their long-term missions? Who should manage them? Where are the sustainable sources for funding? Libraries cannot answer these questions. Only researchers have the required expertise and the appropriate academic, professional, and governmental organizations for the decision-making process.

Looking back over the past twenty years, all development of digital library services has been limited by the institutional nature of academic libraries, which receive limited funding to provide limited information and limited services to a limited community. As a consequence, every major component of the digital library is flawed, and none has the foundation to rise to excellence.

General-purpose institutional repositories did not live up to their promise. [Let IR RIP] The center-of-excellence approach of disciplinary repositories, like ArXiv or PubMed, performed better in spite of less stable funding. Geographical distance between repository managers and scholars did not matter. Disciplinary proximity did.

Once upon a time, the catalog was the search engine. Today, it tells whether a printed item is checked out and/or where it is shelved. It is useless for digital information. It is often not even a good option to find information about print material. The catalog, bloated into an integrated library system, wastes resources that should be redirected towards innovation.

Libraries provide access to their site licenses through journal databases, OpenURL servers, and proxy servers. They pay for this expensive system so publishers can perpetuate a business model that eliminates competition, is rife with conflict of interest, and can impose almost unlimited price increases. Scholars should be able to subscribe to personal libraries as they do for their infotainment. [Hitler, Mother Teresa, and Coke] [Where the Puck won't be] [Annealing the Library] [What if Libraries were the Problem?]

In the paper era, the interlibrary-loan department was the gateway to the world's information. Today, it is mostly a buying agent for costly pay-per-view access to papers not covered by site licenses. Personal libraries would eliminate these requests. Digitization and open access can eliminate requests for out-of-copyright material.

Why is there no scholarly app store, where students and faculty can build their own libraries? By replacing site licenses with app-store subsidies, universities would create a competitive marketplace for subscription journals, open-access journals, experimental publishing platforms, and other scholarly services. A library making an institutional decision must be responsible and safe. One scholar deciding where to publish a paper, whether to cancel a journal, or which citation database to use can take a risk with minimal consequence. This new dynamic would kickstart innovation. [Creative Destruction by Social Network]

Libraries seem safe from disruption for now. There are no senior academics sufficiently masochistic to advocate this kind of change. There are none who are powerful enough to implement it. However, libraries that have become middlemen for outsourced mediocre information services are losing advocates within the upper echelons of academic administrations every day. The cost of site licenses, author page charges, and obsolete services are effectively cutting the innovation budget. Unable to attract or retain innovators, stagnating libraries will just muddle through while digital services bleed out. When some services fall apart, others become collateral damage. The print collection will shrink until it is a paper archive of rare and special items locked in a vault.

Postscript: I intended to write about transforming libraries into centers of excellence. This fell apart in the writing. I hesitated. I rewrote. I reconsidered. I started over again.
If I am right, libraries are on the wrong track, and there is no better track. Libraries cannot possibly remain relevant by replicating the same digital services on every campus. There is a legitimate need for advanced information services supported by centers of excellence. However, it is easier to build new centers from scratch than to transform libraries tied up in institutional straitjackets.
Perhaps, paper-era managers moved too slowly and missed the opportunity that seemed so obvious twenty years ago. Perhaps, that opportunity was just a mirage. Whatever the reason, rank-and-file library staff will be the unwitting victims. 
Perhaps, I am wrong. Perhaps, academic libraries will carve out a meaningful digital future. If they do, it will be by taking big risks. The conventional options have been exhausted.

Creative Destruction by Social Network

Academia.edu bills itself as a platform for scholars to share their research. As a start-up, it still provides mostly free services to attract more users. Last year, it tried to make some money by selling recommendations to scholarly papers, but the backlash from academics was swift and harsh. That plan was shelved immediately. [Scholars Criticize Academia.edu Proposal to Charge Authors for Recommendations]

All scholarly publishers sell recommendations, albeit artfully packaged in prestige and respectability. Academia.edu's direct approach seemed downright vulgar. If they plan a radically innovative replacement for journals, they will need a subtler approach. At least, they chose the perfect target for an attempt at creative destruction: Scholarly communication is the only type of publishing not disrupted by the web, it has sky-high profit margins, it is inefficient, and it is dominated by a relatively few well-connected insiders.

If properly designed (and that is a big if), a scholarly network could reduce the cost of all aspects of scholarly communication, even without radical innovation. It could improve the delivery of services to scholars. It could increase (open) access to research. And it could do all of this while scholars retain control over their own output for as long as feasible and/or appropriate. A scholarly network could also increase the operational efficiency of participating universities, research labs, and funding agencies.

All components of such a system already exist in some form:

Personal archive. Academics are already giving away ownership of their published works to publishers. They should not repeat this historic mistake by giving social networks control over their unpublished writings, data, and scholarly correspondence. They should only participate in social networks that make it easy to pack up and leave. Switching or leaving networks should be as simple as downloading an automatically created personal archive of everything the user shared on the network. Upon death or incapacity, the personal archive and perhaps the account itself should transfer to an archival institution designated by the user.

Marketplace for research tools. Every discipline has its own best practices. Every research group has its preferred tools and information resources. All scholars have their idiosyncrasies. To accomplish this level of customization, a universal platform needs an app store, where scholars could obtain apps that provide reference libraries, digital lab notebooks, data analysis and management, data visualization, collaborative content creation, communication, etc.

Marketplace for professional services. Sometimes, others can do the work better, faster, and/or cheaper. Tasks that come to mind are reference services, editorial and publishing services, graphics, video production, prototyping, etc.

Marketplace for institutional services. All organizations manage some business processes that need to be streamlined. They can do this faster and cheaper by sharing their solutions. For example, universities might be interested to buy and/or exchange applications that track PhD theses as they move through the approval process, that automatically deposit faculty works into their institutional repositories, that manage faculty-research review processes, that assist the preparation of grant applications, and that manage the oversight of awarded research grants. Funding agencies might be interested in services to accept and manage grant applications, to manage peer review, and to track post-award research progress.

Certificates. When a journal accepts a paper, it produces an unalterable version of record. This serves as an implied certificate from the publisher. When a university awards a degree, it certifies that the student has attended the university and has completed all degree requirements. Incidentally, it also certifies the faculty status of exam-committee members. Replacing implicit with explicit certificates would enable new services, such as CVs in which every paper, every academic position, and every degree is certified by the appropriate authority.

A scholarly network like this is a specialized business-application exchange, a concept pioneered by the AppExchange of Salesforce.com. Every day, thousands of organizations replace internal business processes with more efficient applications. Over time, this creates a gradual cumulative effect: Business units shrink to their essential core. They disappear or merge with other units. Corporate structures change. Whether or not we are prepared for the consequences of these profound changes, these technology-enabled efficiencies advance unrelentingly across all industries.

These trends will, eventually, affect everyone. While touting the benefits of creative destruction in their journals, the scholarly-communication system successfully protected itself. Like PDF, the current system is a digitally replication the paper system. It ignores the flexibility of digital information, while it preserves the paper-era business processes and revenue streams of publishers, middlemen, and libraries.

Most scholars manage several personal digital libraries for their infotainment. Yet, they are restricted by the usage terms of institutional site licenses for their professional information resources. [Where the Puck won't be] When they share papers with colleagues and students, they put themselves at legal risk. Scholarly networks will not solve every problem. They will have unintended consequences. But, like various open-access projects, they are another opportunity for scholars to reclaim the initiative.

Recently, ResearchGate obtained serious start-up funding. [ResearchGate raises $52.6M for its social research network for scientists] I hope more competitors will follow. Organizations and projects like ArXiv, Figshare, Mendeley, Web of Knowledge, and Zotero have the technical expertise, user communities, and platforms on which to build. There are thousands of organizations that can contribute to marketplaces for research tools, professional services, and institutional services. There are millions of scholars eager for change.

Build it, and they will come... Or they will just use Sci-Hub anyway.

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.

Creating Knowledge

Every scholar is part wizard, part muggle.

As wizards, scholars are lone geniuses in search of original insight. They question everything. They ignore conventional wisdom and tradition. They experiment.

As muggles, scholars are subject to the normal rules of power and influence. They are limited by common sense and group think. They are ambitious. They promote and market their ideas. They have the perfect elevator pitch ready for every potential funder of research. They connect their research to hot fields. They climb the social ladder in professional societies. As muggles, they know that the lone voice is probably wrong.

The sad fate of the wizards is that their discoveries, no matter how significant, are not knowledge until accepted by the muggles.

Einstein stood on the shoulder of giants: he needed all of the science that preceded him. First, he needed it to develop special relativity theory. Then, he needed it as a starting point from where to lead the physics community on an intellectual journey. Without that base of prior shared knowledge, they would not have followed.

As a social construct, knowledge moves at a speed limited by the wisdom of the crowd. The real process by which scholarly research moves from the world of the wizard into the world of muggles is murky, complicated, longwinded, and ambiguous. Despising these properties, muggles created a clear and straightforward substitute: the peer-review process.

When only a small number of distinguished scholarly bodies published journals, publishing signaled that the research was widely accepted as valid and important. Today, thousands of scholarly groups and commercial entities publish as many as 28,000 scholarly journals, and publishing no longer functions as a serious proxy for wide acceptance.

Most journals are created when some researchers believe established journals ignore or do not sufficiently support a new field of inquiry. New journals give new fields the time and space to grow and to prove themselves. They also reduce the size of the referee pool. They avoid generalists critical of the new field. Gradually, peer review becomes a process in which likeminded colleagues distribute stamps of approval to each other.

Publishers thrive by amplifying scholarly fractures and by creating scholarly islands. As discussed in previous blog posts, normal free-market principles do not apply to the scholarly-journal market. [What if Libraries were the Problem] Without an effective method to kill off journals, their number and size keep increasing. Unfortunately, the damage to universities and to scholarship far exceeds the cost of journals.

Niche fields use their success in the scholarly-communication market to acquire departmental status, making the scholarly fracture permanent. The economic crisis may have stopped or reversed the trend of ever more specialized, smaller, university departments, but the increased cost structure inherited from the boom years lingers. Creating a new department should be an exceptional event. Universities went overboard, influenced and pressured by commercial interests.

As a quality-control system, the scholarly-communication system should be conservative and skeptical. As a communication system, it should give exposure to new ideas and give them a chance to develop. By simultaneously pursuing two contradictory goals, scholarly journals have become ineffective at both. They are too specialized to be credible validators. They are too slow and bureaucratic for growing new ideas.

Journals survive because universities use them for assessment. Not surprisingly, scholarly papers solidly reside in muggle world. Too many papers are written by Very Serious Intellectuals (VSIs) for VSIs. Too many papers are written in self-aggrandizing pompous prose, loaded with countless footnotes. Too many papers are written to flatter VSIs with too many irrelevant references. Too many papers are written to puff up a tidbit of incremental information. Too many papers are written. Too few papers detail negative results or offer serious critique, because that only makes enemies.

When given the opportunity, scholarly authors produce awe inspiring presentations. The edutainment universe of TED Talks may not be an appropriate forum for the daily grunt work of the scholar, but is it really too much to ask that the scholarly-communication system let the wizardry shine through?

Universities claim to be society's engines of innovation. They have preached the virtues of creative destruction brought on by technological innovation. Yet, the wizards of the ivory tower resist minor change as much as the muggles of the world.

Open Access is catalyzing reform on the business side of the scholarly-communication system. Will Open Access be enough to push universities into experimentation on the scholarly side?

That is an Open question.

The Metadata Bubble

In an ideal world, scholars deposit their papers in an Open Access repository, because they know it will advance their research, support their students, and promote a knowledge-based society. A few disciplinary repositories, like ArXiv, have shown that it is possible to close the virtuous cycle where scholars reinforce each other's Open Access habits. In these communities, no authority is needed to compel participation.

Institutional repositories have yet to build similar broad-based enthusiastic constituencies. Yet, many Open Access advocates believe that the decentralized approach of institutional repositories creates a more scalable system with a higher probability for long-term survival. The campaign to enact institutional deposit mandates hopes to jump start an Open Access virtuous cycle for all scholarly disciplines and all institutions. The risk of such a campaign is that it may backfire if scholars should experience Open Access as an obligation with few benefits. For long-term success, most scholars must perceive their compelled participation in Open Access as a positive experience.

It is, therefore, crucial that repositories become essential scholarly resources, not dark archives to be opened only in case of emergency. The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) repository design provided what was thought to be the necessary architecture. Unfortunately, we are far from realizing its anticipated potential. The Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) allows service providers to harvest any metadata in any format, but most repositories provide only minimal Dublin Core metadata, a format in which most fields are optional and several are ambiguous. Extremely few repositories enable Object Reuse and Exchange (OAI-ORE), which allows for complex inter-repository services through the exchange of multimedia objects, not just metadata about them. As a result, OAI-enabled services are largely limited to the most elementary kind of searches, and even these often deliver unsatisfactory results, like metadata-only placeholder records for works restricted by copyright or other considerations.

In a few years, we will entrust our life and limb to self-driving cars. Their programs have just milliseconds to compute critical decisions based on information that is imprecise, approximate, incomplete, and inconsistent: all maps are outdated by the time they are produced, GPS signals may disappear, radar and/or lidar signatures are ambiguous, and video or images provide obstructed views in constantly changing environments. When we can extract so much actionable information from such "dirty" information, it seems quaint to obsess about metadata.

Databases automatically record user interactions. Users fill out forms and effectively crowdsource metadata. Expert systems can extract, from any document in any format and in any language, author information, citations, keywords, DNA sequences, chemical formulas, mathematical equations, etc. Other expert systems have growing capabilities to analyze sound, image, and video. Technology is evaporating the pool of problems that require human intervention at the transaction level. The opportunities for human metadata experts to add value are disappearing fast.

The metadata approach is obsolete for an even more fundamental reason. Metadata are the digital extension of a catalog-centered paper-based information system. In this kind of system, today's experts organize today's information so tomorrow's users may solve tomorrow's problems efficiently. This worked well when technology changed slowly, when experts could predict who the future users would be, what kind of problems they would like to solve, and what kind of tools they would have at their disposal. These conditions no longer apply.

When digital storage is cheap, why implement expensive selection processes for an archive? When search technology does not care whether information is excruciatingly organized or piled in a heap, why spend countless hours organizing and curating content? Why agonize over potential future problems with unreadable file formats? Preserve all the information about current software and standards, and start developing the expert systems to unscramble any historical format. Think of any information-management task. How reasonable is the proposition that this task will require direct human intervention in two years? In five years? In ten years?

For content, more is more. We must acquire as much content as possible, and store it safely.

For content administration, less is more. Expert systems give us the freedom to do the bare minimum and to make a mess of it. While we must make content useful and enable as many services as possible, it is no longer feasible to accomplish that by designing systems for an anticipated future. Instead, we must create the conditions that attract developers of expert systems. This is remarkably simple: Make the full text and all data available with no strings attached.

Real Open Access.

Disruption Disrupted?

The professor who books his flights online, reserves lodging with Airbnb, and arranges airport transportation with Uber understands the disruption of the travel industry. He actively supports that disruption every time he attends a conference. When MOOCs threaten his job, when The Economist covers reinventing the university and titles it “Creative Destruction", that same professor may have second thoughts. With or without disruption, academia surely is in a period of immense change. There is the pressure to reduce costs and tuition, the looming growth of MOOCs, the turmoil in scholarly communication (subscription prices, open access, peer review, alternative metrics), the increased competition for funding, etc.

The term disruption was coined and popularized by Harvard Business School Professor Clayton Christensen, author of The Innovator's Dilemma. [The Innovator's Dilemma, Clayton Christensen, Harvard Business Review Press, 1997] Christensen created a compelling framework for understanding the process of innovation and disruption. Along the way, he earned many accolades in academia and business. In recent years, a cooling of the academic admiration became increasingly noticeable. A snide remark here. A dismissive tweet there. Then, The New Yorker launched a major attack on the theory of disruption. [The Disruption Machine, Jill Lepore, The New Yorker, June 23rd, 2014] In this article, Harvard historian Jill Lepore questions Christensen's research by attacking the underlying facts. Were Christensen's disruptive startups really startups? Did the established companies really lose the war or just one battle? At the very least, Lepore is implying that Christensen misled his readers.

As of this writing, Christensen has only responded in a brief interview. [Clayton Christensen Responds to New Yorker Takedown of 'Disruptive Innovation', Bloomberg Businessweek, June 20th, 2014] It is clear he is preparing a detailed written response.

Lepore's critique appears at the moment when disruption may be at academia's door, seventeen years after The Innovator's Dilemma was published, much of the research almost twenty years old. Perhaps, the article is merely a symptom of academics growing nervous. Yet, it would be wrong to dismiss Lepore's (or anyone other's) criticism based on any perceived motivation. Facts can be and should be examined.

In 1997, I was a technology manager tasked with dragging a paper-based library into the digital era. When reading (and re-reading) the book, I did not question the facts. When Christensen stated that upstart X disrupted established company Y, I accepted it. I assume most readers did. The book was based on years of research, all published in some of the most prestigious peer-reviewed journals. It is reasonable to assume that the underlying facts were scrutinized by several independent experts. Truth be told, I did not care much that his claims were backed by years of research. Christensen gave power to the simple idea that sticking with established technology can carry an enormous opportunity cost.

Established technology has had years, perhaps decades, to mitigate its weaknesses. It has a constituency of users, service providers, sales channels, and providers of derivative services. This constituency is a force that defends the status quo in order to maintain established levels of quality, profit margins, and jobs. The innovators do not compete on a level playing field. Their product may improve upon the old in one or two aspects, but it has not yet had the opportunity to mitigate its weaknesses. When faced with such innovations, all organizations tend to stick with what they know for as long as possible.

Christensen showed the destructive power of this mind set. While waiting until the new is good enough or better, organizations lose control of the transition process. While pleasing their current customers, they lose future customers. By not being ahead of the curve, by ignoring innovation, by not restructuring their organizations ahead of time, leaders may put their organizations at risk. Christensen told compelling disruption stories in many different industries. This allowed readers to observe their own industry with greater detachment. It gave readers the confidence to push for early adoption of inevitable innovation.

I am not about to take sides in the Lepore-Christensen debate. Neither needs my help. As an observer interested in scholarly communication, I cannot help but noting that Lepore, a distinguished scholar, launched her critique from a distinctly non-scholarly channel. The New Yorker may cater to the upper-crust of intellectuals (and wannabes), but it remains a magazine with journalistic editorial-review processes, quite distinct from scholarly peer-review processes.

Remarkably, the same happened only a few weeks ago, when the Financial Times attempted to take down Piketty's book. [Capital in the Twenty-First Century, Thomas Piketty, Belknap Press; 2014]  [Piketty findings undercut by errors, Chris Giles, Financial Times, May 23rd, 2014] Piketty had a distinct advantage over Christensen. The Financial Times critique appeared a few weeks after his book came out. Moreover, he had made all of his data public, including all technical adjustments required to make data from different sources compatible. As a result, Piketty was able to respond quickly, and the controversy quickly dissipated. Christensen has the unenviable task of defending twenty-year old research. For his sake, I hope he was better at archiving data than I was in the 1990s.

What does it say about the status of scholarly journals when scholars use magazines to launch scholarly critiques? Was Lepore's article not sufficiently substantive for a peer-reviewed journal? Are scholarly journals incapable or unwilling to handle academic controversy involving one of its eminent leaders? Is the mainstream press just better at it? Would a business journal even allow a historian to critique business research in its pages? If this is the case, is peer review less about maintaining standards and more about protecting an academic tribe? Is the mainstream press just a vehicle for some scholars to bypass peer review and academic standards? What would it say about peer review if Lepore's arguments should prevail?

This detached observer pours a drink and enjoys the show.


PS (7/15/2014): Reposted with permission at The Impact Blog of The London School of Economics and Political Science.

Textbook Economics

The impact of royalties on a book's price, and its sales, is greater than you think. Lower royalties often end up better for the author. That was the publisher's pitch when I asked him about the details of the proposed publishing contract. Then, he explained how he prices textbooks.

It was the early 1990s, I had been teaching a course on Concurrent Scientific Computing, a hot topic then, and several publishers had approached me about writing a textbook. This was an opportunity to structure a pile of course notes. Eventually, I would sign on with a different publisher, a choice that had nothing to do with royalties or book prices. [Concurrent Scientific Computing, Van de Velde E., Springer-Verlag New York, Inc., New York, NY, 1994.]

He explained that a royalty of 10% increases the price by more than 10%. To be mathematical about it: With a royalty rate r, a target revenue per book C, and a retail price P, we have that C = P-rP (retail price minus royalties). Therefore, P = C/(1-r). With a target revenue per book of $100, royalties of 10%, 15%, and 20% lead to retail prices of $111.11, $117.65, and $125.00, respectively.

In a moment of candor, he also revealed something far more interesting: how he sets the target revenue C. Say the first printing of 5000 copies requires an up-front investment of $100,000. (All numbers are for illustrative purposes only.) This includes the cost of editing, copy-editing, formatting, cover design, printing, binding, and administrative overhead. Estimating library sales at 1000 copies, this publisher would set C at $100,000/1,000 = $100. In other words, he recovered his up-front investment from libraries. Retail sales were pure profit.

The details are, no doubt, more complicated. Yet, even without relying on a recollection of an old conversation, it is safe to assume that publishers use the captive library market to reduce their business risk. In spite of increasingly recurrent crises, library budgets remain fairly predictable, both in size and in how the money is spent. Any major publisher has reliable advance estimates of library sales for any given book, particularly if published as part of a well-known series. It is just good business to exploit that predictability.

The market should be vastly different now, but textbooks have remained stuck in the paper era longer than other publications. Moreover, the first stage of the move towards digital, predictably, consists of replicating the paper world. This is what all constituents want: Librarians want to keep lending books. Researchers and students like getting free access to quality books. Textbook publishers do not want to lose the risk-reducing revenue stream from libraries. As a result, everyone implements the status quo in digital form. Publishers produce digital books and rent their collections to libraries through site licenses. Libraries intermediate electronic-lending transactions. Users get the paper experience in digital form. Universities pay for site licenses and the maintenance of the digital-lending platforms.

After the disaster of site licenses for scholarly journals, repeating the same mistake with books seems silly. Once again, take-it-or-leave-it bundles force institutions into a false choice between buying too much for everyone or nothing at all. Once again, site licenses eliminate the unlimited flexibility of digital information. Forget about putting together a personal collection tailored to your own requirements. Forget about pricing per series, per book, per chapter, unlimited in time, one-day access, one-hour access, readable on any device, or tied to a particular device. All of these options are eliminated to maintain the business models and the intermediaries of the paper era.

Just by buying/renting books as soon as they are published, libraries indirectly pay for a significant fraction of the initial investment of producing textbooks. If libraries made that initial investment explicitly and directly, they could produce those same books and set them free. Instead of renting digital books (and their multimedia successors), libraries could fund authors to write books and contract with publishers to publish those manuscripts as open-access works. Authors would be compensated. Publishers would compete for library funds as service providers. Publishers would be free to pursue the conventional pay-for-access publishing model, just not with library dollars. Prospective authors would have a choice: compete for library funding to produce an open-access work or compete for a publishing contract to produce a pay-for-access work.

The Carnegie model of libraries fused together two distinct objectives: subsidize information and disseminate information by distributing books to many different locations. In web-connected communities, spending precious resources on dissemination is a waste. Inserting libraries in digital-lending transactions only makes those transactions more inconvenient. Moreover, it requires expensive-to-develop-and-maintain technology. By reallocating these resources towards subsidizing information, libraries could set information free without spending part of their budget on reducing publishers' business risk. The fundamental budget questions that remain are: Which information should be subsidized? What is the most effective way to subsidize information?

Libraries need not suddenly stop site licensing books tomorrow. In fact, they should take a gradual approach, test the concept, make mistakes, and learn from them. A library does not become a grant sponsor and/or publisher overnight. Several models are already available: from grant competition to crowd-funded ungluing. [Unglue.it for Libraries] By phasing out site licenses, any library can create budgetary space for sponsoring open-access works.

Libraries have a digital future with almost unlimited opportunities. Yet, they will miss out if they just rebuild themselves as a digital copy of the paper era.

A Cloud over the Internet

Cloud computing could not have existed without the Internet, but it may make Internet history by making the Internet history.

Organizations are rushing to move their data centers to the cloud. Individuals have been using cloud-based services, like social networks, cloud gaming, Google Apps, Netflix, and Aereo. Recently, Amazon introduced WorkSpaces, a comprehensive personal cloud-computing service. The immediate benefits and opportunities that fuel the growth of the cloud are well known. The long-term consequences of cloud computing are less obvious, but a little extrapolation may help us make some educated guesses.

Personal cloud computing takes us back to the days of remote logins with dumb terminals and modems. Like the one-time office computer, the cloud computer does almost all of the work. Like the dumb terminal, a not-so-dumb access device (anything from the latest wearable gadget to a desktop) handles input/output. Input evolved beyond keystrokes and now also includes touch-screen gestures, voice, image, and video. Output evolved from green-on-black characters to multimedia.

When accessing a web page with content from several contributors (advertisers, for example), the page load time depends on several factors: the performance of computers that contribute web-page components, the speed of the Internet connections that transmit these components, and the performance of the computer that assembles and formats the web page for display. By connecting to the Internet through a cloud computer, we bypass the performance limitations of our access device. All bandwidth-hungry communication occurs in the cloud on ultra-fast networks, and almost all computation occurs on a high-performance cloud computer. The access device and its Internet connection just need to be fast enough to process the information streams into and out of the cloud. Beyond that, the performance of the access device hardly matters.

Because of economies of scale, the cloud-enabled net is likely to be a highly centralized system dominated by a small number of extremely large providers of computing and networking. This extreme concentration of infrastructure stands in stark contrast to the original Internet concept, which was designed as a redundant, scalable, and distributed system without a central authority or a single point of failure.

When a cloud provider fails, it disrupts its own customers, and the disruption immediately propagates to the customers' clients. Every large provider is, therefore, a systemic vulnerability with the potential of taking down a large fraction of the world's networked services. Of course, cloud providers are building infrastructure of extremely high reliability with redundant facilities spread around the globe to protect against regional disasters. Unfortunately, facilities of the same provider all have identical vulnerabilities, as they use identical technology and share identical management practices. This is a setup for black-swan events, low-probability large-scale catastrophes.

The Internet is overseen and maintained by a complex international set of authorities. [Wikipedia: Internet Governance] That oversight loses much of its influence when most communication occurs within the cloud. Cloud providers will be tempted to deploy more efficient custom communication technology within their own facilities. After all, standard Internet protocols were designed for heterogeneous networks. Much of that design is not necessary on a network where one entity manages all computing and all communication. Similarly, any two providers may negotiate proprietary communication channels between their facilities. Step by step, the original Internet will be relegated to the edges of the cloud, where access devices connect with cloud computers.

Net neutrality is already on life support. When cloud providers compete on price and performance, they are likely to segment the market. Premium cloud providers are likely to attract high-end services and their customers, relegating the rest to second-tier low-cost providers. Beyond net neutrality, there may be a host of other legal implications when communication moves from public channels to private networks.

When traffic moves to the cloud, telecommunication companies will gradually lose the high-margin retail market of providing organizations and individuals with high-bandwidth point-to-point communication. They will not derive any revenue from traffic between computers within the same cloud facility. The revenue from traffic between cloud facilities will be determined by a wholesale market with customers that have the resources to build and/or acquire their own communication capacity.

The existing telecommunication infrastructure will mostly serve to connect access devices to the cloud over relatively low-bandwidth channels. When TV channels are delivered to the cloud (regardless of technology), users select their channel on the cloud computer. They do not need all channels delivered to the home at all times; one TV channel at a time per device will do. When phones are cloud-enabled, a cloud computer intermediates all communication and provides the functional core of the phone.

Telecommunication companies may still come out ahead as long as the number of access devices keeps growing. Yet, they should at least question whether it would be more profitable to invest in cloud computing instead of ever higher bandwidth to the consumer.

The cloud will continue to grow as long as its unlimited processing power, storage capacity, and communication bandwidth provide new opportunities at irresistible price points. If history is any guide, long-term and low-probability problems at the macro level are unlikely to limit its growth. Even if our extrapolated scenario never completely materializes, the cloud will do much more than increase efficiency and/or lower cost. It will change the fundamental character of the Internet.

Beall's Rant

Jeffrey Beall of Beall's list of predatory scholarly publishers recently made some strident arguments against Open Access (OA) in the journal tripleC (ironically, an OA journal). Beall's comments are part of a non-refereed section dedicated to a discussion on OA.

Michael Eisen takes down Beall's opinion piece paragraph by paragraph. Stevan Harnad responds to the highlights/lowlights. Roy Tennant has a short piece on Beall in The Digital Shift.

Beall's takes a distinctly political approach in his attack on OA:

“The OA movement is an anti-corporatist movement that wants to deny the freedom of the press to companies it disagrees with.”
“It is an anti-corporatist, oppressive and negative movement, [...]”
“[...] a neo-colonial attempt to cast scholarly communication policy according to the aspirations of a cliquish minority of European collectivists.”
“[...] mandates set and enforced by an onerous cadre of Soros-funded European autocrats.”

This is the rhetorical style of American extremist right-wing politics that casts every problem as a false choice between freedom and – take your pick – communism or totalitarianism or colonialism or slavery or... European collectivists like George Soros (who became a billionaire by being a free-market capitalist).

For those of us more comfortable with technocratic arguments, politics is not particularly welcome. Yet, we cannot avoid the fact that the OA movement is trying to reform a large socio-economic system. It would be naïve to think that that can be done without political ideology playing a role. But is it really too much to ask to avoid the lowest level of political debate, politics by name-calling?

The system of subscription journals has an internal free-market logic to it that no proposed or existing OA system has been able to replace. In a perfect world, the subscription system uses an economic market to assess the quality of editorial boards and the level of interest in a particular field. Economic viability acts as a referee of sorts, a market-based minimum standard. Some editorial boards deserve the axe for doing poor work. Some fields of study deserve to go out of business for lack of interest. New editorial boards and new fields of study deserve an opportunity to compete. Most of us prefer that these decisions are made by the collective and distributed wisdom of free-market mechanisms.

Unfortunately, the current scholarly-communication marketplace is far from a free market. Journals hardly compete directly with one another. Site licenses perpetuate a paper-era business model that forces universities to buy all content for 100% of the campus community, even those journals that are relevant only to a sliver of the community. Site licenses limit competition between journals, because end users never get to make the price/value trade-offs critical to a functional free market. The Big Deal exacerbates the problem. Far from providing a service, as Beall contends, the Big Deal gives big publishers a platform to launch new journals without competition. Consortial deals are not discounts; they introduce peer networks to make it more difficult to cancel existing subscriptions. [What if Libraries were the Problem?] [Libraries: Paper Tigers in a Digital World]

If Beall believes in the free market, he should support competition from new methods of dissemination, alternative assessment techniques, and new journal business models. Instead, he seems to be motivated more by a desire to hold onto his disrupted job description:

“Now the realm of scholarly communication is being removed from libraries, and a crisis has settled in. Money flows from authors to publishers rather than from libraries to publishers. We've disintermediated libraries and now find that scholarly system isn't working very well.”

In fact, it is the site-license model that reduced the academic library to the easy-to-disintermediate dead-end role of subscription manager. [Where the Puck won't Be] Most librarians are apprehensive about the changes taking place, but they also realize that they must re-interpret traditional library values in light of new technology to ensure long-term survival of their institution.

Thus far, scholarly publishing has been the only type of publishing not disrupted by the Internet. In his seminal work on disruption [The Innovator's Dilemma], Clayton Christensen characterizes the defenders of the status quo in disrupted industries. Like Beall, they are blinded by traditional quality measures, dismiss and/or denigrate innovations, and retreat into a defense of the status quo.

Students, researchers, and the general public deserve a high-quality scholarly-communication system that satisfies basic minimum technological requirements of the 21st century. [Peter Murray-Rust, Why does scholarly publishing give me so much technical grief?] In the last 20 years of the modern Internet, we have witnessed innovation after innovation. Yet, scholarly publishing is still tied to the paper-imitating PDF format and to paper-era business models.

Open Access may not be the only answer [Open Access Doubts], but it may very well be the opportunity that this crisis has to offer. [Annealing the Library] In American political terms, Green Open Access is a public option. It provides free access to author-formatted versions of papers. Thereby, it serves the general public and the scholarly poor. It also serves researchers by providing a platform for experimentation without having to go through onerous access negotiations (for text mining, for example). It also serves as an additional disruptive trigger for free-market reform of the scholarly market. Gold Open Access in all its forms (from PLOS to PEERJ) is a set of business models that deserve a chance to compete on price and quality.

The choice is not between one free-market option and a plot of European collectivists. The real choice is whether to protect a functionally inadequate system or whether to foster an environment of innovation.

Cartoon Physics

When Wile E. Coyote runs off a cliff, he starts falling only after he realizes the precariousness of his situation.

In real life, cartoon physics is decidedly less funny. Market bubbles arise when a trend continues far past the point where the fundamentals make sense. The bubble bursts when the collective wisdom of the market acts on a reality that should have been obvious much earlier. Because of this unnecessary delay, bubbles inflict much unnecessary damage. We saw it recently with the Internet and mortgage bubbles, but the phenomenon is as old as the tulip bubble of 1637.

We also see cartoon physics in action at less epic scales. Cartoon physics applies to almost any disruptive technology. The established players almost never adapt to the new reality when fundamentals require it or when it is logical to do so. Instead of preparing for a viable future, they fight a losing battle hanging onto the past. Most recently, Blackberry ignored the iPhone thinking its serious corporate clients would not be lured by its gadgetry. There is a long line of disrupted industries whose leadership ignored upstart competitors and new realities. This has been the topic of acclaimed academic studies and popularized in every possible venue.

The blame game is a significant part of the process. The recording industry blamed pirates for destroying the music business. In fact, their own neglect to adapt to a digital age contributed at least as much to the disruption.

The scenario is well known, by now too cliché to be a good movie. Leaders of industries in upheaval should know the playbook. Yet, they keep repeating the mistakes of their disrupted predecessors.

Wile E. Coyote finally learned his lesson and decided to stop looking down.

PS: Cartoon physics does not apply to academic institutions, which are protected by their importance and seriousness.

Where the Puck won't be

“I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.”

Wayne Gretzky

The academic library has, by default, tied its destiny to a service with no realistic prospects of long-term survival. It has become a systems integrator that stitches together outsourced components into a digital recreation of a paper-based library. This horseless carriage provides the same commodity service to an undergraduate student majoring in chemistry, a graduate student in economics, and a professor of literature. Because it overwhelms the library's budget, organizational structure, and decision-making processes, this expensive and inefficient service hampers innovation in areas that are the library's best hope for survival.

A paper-based library gradually builds a collection of ever-increasing value, and its overhead builds permanent infrastructure. Its digital recreation never builds lasting value. It is a maintenance service, and its overhead is pure inefficiency. This overhead, duplicated at thousands of universities, starts with the costs of preparing for and conducting near-futile site-license negotiations. To shave off a point here and there, the library spends countless staff hours on usage surveys, faculty discussions, consortium meetings, and negotiations with publishers and their middlemen. But the game is rigged. If 15% of a campus wants Journal A, 15% competing Journal B, 10% wants both A and B, and the rest wants neither, the library is effectively forced to rent both A and B for 100% of the campus. This is why scholarly publishers were able to raise prices at super-inflationary rates during a time when all other publishers faced catastrophic disruption. After conducting expensive negotiations, after paying inflated prices, the library must still pay for, build, and maintain the platform that protects publishers' interests by keeping unwanted users out.

Many academics and librarians hope that Open Access efforts will provide an exit from this unsustainable path. If successful, Green Open Access will lead to price reductions and journal cancellations. Gold Open Access seeks to replace site licenses with author page charges. Either strategy reduces the efficiency of library-mediated digital lending by spreading its fixed overhead costs over fewer and/or less expensive journals. New business models for journals, alternative metrics that give scholarly credibility to unbundled works, and any other innovation that competes with site licenses will reduce efficiency even further. All of these factors hasten the demise of an unsustainable service that is already collapsing under its own weight.

Traditionally, a library adapts in response to changing user behavior, attitude, and opinion. However, the Wayne Gretzky quote became a cliché for a reason. When trends have become obvious and users have moved on, it is too late for strategic restructuring.

At the other extreme, an angel investor bets on someone with a compelling idea, accepts the risk of failure, and is prepared to move on to the next player who knows where the puck will be. The library does not have that luxury. It is an institution, not a venture.

The library must maintain sufficient institutional stability to ensure its archival mission. While Open Access is a given, the service portfolio of the future library is far from settled. We must create budgetary and organizational space for new services. We may not know where precisely the puck will be, but we can still move the team out of a field where there is no game to be played.

When canceling site-licensed journals today, the only legally available alternatives are individual subscriptions, pay per view, and self-archived versions of individual papers. This stands in stark contrast with the digital-entertainment universe, where there is a competitive market for providers of personal digital libraries. Services like Apple ITunes, Google Play, Amazon Kindle and Prime, Netflix, Pandora, Spotify, etc. compete on the basis of price, content, usability, convenience, and features. There are many scholarly-communication organizations that could launch analogous services. Within months, Thomson Reuters, EBSCO, publisher alliances, scholarly societies, and even some research libraries could provide a wide selection of options. This will never happen without starving publishers of site-license revenue. Instead of subsidizing publishers, subsidize students and faculty. They are quite capable to choose for themselves what information services they need. After a messy, but short, transition, a competitive market will blossom.

The only thing more terrifying than phasing out a core service is the prospect of outside forces triggering a sudden disruption. Libraries have the choice to disrupt or to be disrupted, to organize their own restructuring or to be restructured by a crisis manager. This is the perfect time to redirect resources away from digital-lending overhead and towards building a scalable, robust, and permanent infrastructure of open scholarly information (refereed papers, technical reports, lab reports, and supporting data). Björn Brembs wants to go even further; he wants libraries to take over all of scholarly communication.

We do not have to wait for Open Access to work its disruptive magic, which may or may not happen at some undetermined time. By forcing the disruption, the rationale for Green Open Access becomes much more straightforward: It creates a permanent public archive of culturally important content that is now controlled by private companies. As a public option to the publishers' walled garden, it may help keep prices in check. That role is much less important, however, when prices are set in a truly competitive market.

Publishers do not think Green Open Access has the power disrupt. They believe they can compensate lower revenue from Gold Open Access by increasing the number of papers they publish. Should site licenses be disrupted anyway, publishers stand ready to compete with libraries.

Publishers are well prepared for any scenario.

Is your library?

The Empire Strikes Back

Publishers may soon compete with libraries. The business case for enticing users away from library-managed portals is simple, compelling, and growing. As funding agencies and universities enact Open Access (OA) mandates and publishers transition their journals from the site-license model to the Gold OA model, libraries will cease to be the spigots through which money streams from universities to publishers. In the Gold-OA world, the publishers' core business is developing relationships with scholars, not librarians. For publishers, it makes perfect sense to cater to scholars both as authors and readers.


Current direct-to-scholar portals provided by publishers do not live up to their potential. Each portal is limited to content from just one publisher. Without interoperability, each publisher portal is an island. Only scholars covered by a site license can afford to use them, and those scholars have access to a gateway for all site-licensed content irrespective of publisher: their library web site. In spite of these near-fatal flaws, publishers invest heavily in their direct-to-scholar portals.


These portals are opportunities for future growth. The model is well established: Thomson Reuters' Westlaw is the de-facto standard for legal research in the US, and it is able to command premium pricing for structured public-domain information. It may take a long time for scholarly publishers to duplicate Westlaw's success. Yet, even without access fees, publishers might be able to unlock significant marketing and business-intelligence value from their systems. Knowledge from managing the publishing process combined with usage data from their portals will give publishers unprecedented insight into every aspect of scholars' professional lives in education, research, and development.


For publishers, the transition to Gold OA is rather tricky. They hope to maintain their current level of revenue while replacing the income stream from site licenses with an equivalent income stream from author page charges. This goal, implausible just a few years ago, now seems realistically within their grasp. The outcome remains far from certain, and publishers are hedging their bets by fighting Green OA and lobbying hard for embargo periods. As long as site-license revenue is their main source of revenue, publishers cannot afford to compete with libraries and journal aggregators, their current customers and partners. This calculation will change when Gold OA reaches a certain critical point. This is the context of proposals like CHORUS, an attempt to take over Green OA, and Elsevier's acquisition of Mendeley, a brilliant social-network interface for scholarly content.


Publishers, indexing services, journal aggregators, startups, some nonprofit organizations, and library-system vendors all have expertise to produce compelling post-OA services. However, publishers only need to protect their Gold OA income, and any new revenue streams are just icing on the cake. All others need a reasonable expectation of new revenue to develop new services. This sets the stage for a significant consolidation of the scholarly-communication industry into the hands of publishers.


As soon as the Gold OA shock hits, academic libraries must be ready to engage publishers as competitors. When site licenses disappear, there is no more journal-collection development, and digital lending of journals disappears as a core service. This is a time that requires major strategic decisions from leaders in academia. With its recently released new mission statement, the Harvard Library seems to pave the way: “The Harvard Library advances scholarship and teaching by committing itself to the creation, application, preservation and dissemination of knowledge.” The future of the academic library will be implemented on these pillars. While the revised mission statement necessarily lacks specifics, it is crystal-clear in what it omits: collection development.

Chudnov's Mission

Library mission statements are pablum intended to placate everyone and offend no one. It could be different, as I recently found out because of a tweet and a blog from Lorcan Dempsey, which led me to the personal mission statement of Dan Chudnov:

Help people build their own libraries.

How refreshing!

Chudnov blogged this in 2006, the year in which Time Magazine's person of the year was “You.” Youtube had just exploded into our consciousness. Social networking was hot. This was the end of broadcasting and the beginning of narrowcasting. Time Magazine realized then that new web technologies would center around the individual and his or her personal needs and wants. The world embraced this idea.

Libraries could have aligned with this fundamental shift. But seven years later, libraries remain rooted in the concept of providing services for the average user of a particular community. Chudnov's mission is a radical departure from this model and an ambitious goal. Give to the masses what not so long ago was a rare commodity of only the most privileged: a personal library that archives all the information one has created, has consumed, is consuming, and intends to consume.

In 2013, parts of this vision have been realized. Unfortunately, libraries were largely on the sidelines. A slew of commercial enterprises provide aspects of personal digital libraries, either free of charge or at relatively low cost. Google is organizing the world's information, but its personalized services put the individual front and center. Browsers keep track of the information we have consumed, and they let us bookmark the information we intend to consume. Netflix keeps track of our movies, the Kindle store of our books, iTunes of our music, and Gamefly of our games. We archive our writings, our observations, our pictures, our videos in social networks, cloud-based storage, and blogs. Amazon, Facebook, Flickr, Google, Microsoft, Tumblr, Twitter, Yahoo, and many others would love to provide as many services as possible to each of us as part of their corporate strategy. The current situation is chaotic and messy. Yet, the last thing we should strive for is an orderly, easy, convenient information landscape dominated by a few commercial entities and governments. We should wish for more chaos and more providers competing with one another.

We take it increasingly for granted that we can experience our entertainment on our terms. We want to watch our movies and TV shows when the time is right for us, not when a network decides we should watch it. Unlike DVD rentals, streaming services never sell out no matter how many of our neighbors rent the same video. Yet, when it comes to academic libraries and professional information needs, researchers still accept that their individual requirements are subject to community compromises. Researchers whose information needs are much different from those of average library users are effectively relegated to second-class status.

How can a community-based library adapt? What is its role in an environment increasingly dominated by commercial enterprises? What are the specific steps it can take to help its users develop a personal library? What kind of help do its users need? Should the community library provide alternatives for commercial services? Or, should it merely supplement them? How do these new services fit with institutional traditions and commitments? Should the library help its users regain control of the information they ceded to for-profit companies in a Faustian bargain? If yes, what are the concrete steps that can accomplish this? Should the library help its users regain control of search engines dominated by commercial priorities? If yes, how?

Chudnov's mission statement leaves considerable freedom for interpretation. Like all good mission statements, it sets a direction. It provides a long-distance view. It crystallizes what is important in a time of information overload: focus on the real information needs of individuals. Libraries ignore this at their peril.

Turow vs Everyone

According to celebrated author, lawyer, and president of the Author's Guild Scott Turow, the legal and technological erosion of copyright endangers writers. (New York Times, April 7th, 2013) His enemy list is conspiratorial in length and breadth. It includes the Supreme Court, publishers, search engines, the Hathi trust, Google, academics, libraries, and Amazon. Nevertheless, Turow makes compelling arguments that deserve scrutiny.

The Supreme Court decision on re-importation. (Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.)
This 6-3 decision merely reaffirmed the first sale doctrine. It is highly unlikely that this will significantly affect book prices in the US. If it does, any US losses will be offset by price increases in foreign markets. More importantly, the impact will be negligible because paper books will soon be a niche market in the US.

Publishers restrict royalties on e-books.
Publishers who manage the technology shift by making minor business adjustments, such as transferring costs to authors, libraries, and consumers, underestimate the nature of current changes. Traditional publishers built their business when disseminating information was difficult. Once they built their dissemination channels, making money was relatively easy. In our current world, building dissemination channels is easy and cheap. Making money is difficult. Authors may need new partners who built their business in the current environment; there are some in his list of enemies.

Search engines make money of referring users to pirate sites.
Turow has a legitimate moral argument. However, politicizing search engines by censoring search results is as wrong as it is ineffective. Pirate sites also spread through social networks. Cutting off pirate sites from advertizing networks, while effective, is difficult to achieve across international borders and requires unacceptable controls on information exchange. iTunes and its competitors have shown it is possible to compete with pirate sites by providing a convenient user interface, speed, reliability, quality, and protection against computer viruses.

The Hathi trust and Google scanned books without authorization.
Hathi and Google were careless. Authors and publishers were rigid. Experimentation gave way to litigation.

Some academics want to curtail copyright.
Scholarly publishers like Elsevier have profit margins that exceed 30%. Yet, Turow claims that “For many academics today, their own copyrights hold little financial value because scholarly publishing has grown so unprofitable.”

Academics' research is often funded in part by government, and it is always supported by universities. Universities have always been committed to research openness, and they use published research as means for assessment. This is why academics forego royalties when they publish research. The concept of research openness is changing, and many academics are lobbying for the idea that research should be freely available to all. The idea of Open Access was recently embraced by the White House. Open Access applies only to researchers funded by the government and/or employed by participating universities and research labs. It only covers research papers, not books. It does not apply to independent authors. Open Access does not curtail copyright.

Legal academics like Prof. Lawrence Lessig have argued for stricter limits on traditional copyright and alternative copyrights. Pressured by industry lobbyists, Congress has repeatedly increased the length of copyright. If this trend continues, recent works may never enter into the public domain. Legislation must balance authors' intellectual property rights and everyone's (including authors') freedom to produce derivative works, commentaries, parodies, etc.

Amazon patents a scheme to re-sell used e-books.
This patent is a misguided attempt to monetize the human frailty of carrying familiar concepts from old technology senselessly into the new. It is hardly the stuff that made this forward-looking company formidable.

Libraries expand paper lending into digital lending.
Turow demands more money from libraries for digital lending privileges. He is too modest; he should demand their whole budget.

When a paper-based library acquires a book, it permanently increases the value of its collection. This cumulative effect over many years created the world's great collections. When a community spends resources on a digital-lending library, it rents information from publishers and provides a fleeting service for only as long as the licenses last. When the license ends, the information disappears. There is no cumulative effect. That digital-lending library only adds overhead. It will never own or contribute new information. It is an empty shell.

Digital lending is popular with the public. It gives librarians the opportunity to transition gradually into digital space. It continues the libraries' billion-dollar money stream to publishers. Digital lending have a political constituency, but it does not stand up to rational scrutiny. Like Amazon's scheme to resell used e-books, digital-lending programs are desperate attempts to hang on to something that simulates the status quo.

Lending is the wrong paradigm for the digital age. Instead, libraries should use their budgets to accumulate quality open-access information. They should sponsor qualified authors to produce open-access works of interest to the communities they serve. This would give authors a choice. They could either produce their work commercially behind a pay wall, or they could produce library-funded open-access works.

Open Access Politics

The Open Access (OA) movement is gaining some high-level political traction.

The White House Open Access memorandum enacts a national Green OA mandate: Most US funding agencies are directed to set up OA repositories for the research they fund. This Green OA strategy contrasts with the Gold OA strategy proposed by the Finch report in the UK. The latter all but guarantees that established publishers will retain their revenue stream if they switch their business model from site licenses to Author Page Charges (APCs).

The White House memorandum is likely to have the greatest impact. As its consequences ripple through the system, the number and size of Green OA repositories is likely to grow substantially over the next few years. Large-scale validation of altmetrics and the development of new business models may lead to the emergence of new forms of scholarly communication. Green OA archivangelist Stevan Harnad hypothesizes a ten-step scenario of changes.

There are also reasons for concern. As this new phase of the OA movement unfolds on the national political stage, all sides will use their influence and try to re-shape the initial policies to further their respective agendas. The outcome of this political game is far from certain. Worse, the outcome may not be settled for years, as these kind of policies are easily reversed without significant voter backlash.

At its core, OA is about an industry changing because of (not-so-)new technology and its accompanying shift in attitudes and values. In such cases, we expect established players to resist innovation by (ab)using politics and litigation. The entertainment industry lobbied and litigated against VCRs, DVRs, every Internet service ever launched, and now even antennas. In the dysfunctional scholarly-communication market, on the other hand, it is the innovators who resort to politics.

To understand why, suppose university libraries were funded by user-paid memberships and/or service fees. In this scenario, libraries and publishers encountered the same paper-to-digital transition costs. When library prices sky rocketed, students and faculty created underground exchanges of scholarly information. They cancelled their library memberships and/or stopped using their services. The publishers' revenue streams collapsed. Only the most successful journals survived, and even they suffered. Publishing a paper became increasingly difficult because of a lack of journals. This created an opening for experiments in scholarly publishing. This bottoms-up free-market transition would have been chaotic, painful, and forgotten by now.

We do not need to convert our libraries and research institutions into free-market enterprises. We do not need to abandon the fundamental principles on which these institutions are built. On the contrary, we must return to those principles and apply them in a new technological reality. Rebuilding the foundations of institutions is hard under the best of circumstances. When users are shielded from the external incentives/hardships of the free market, it is near impossible to disrupt, and continuity remains an option far beyond reason.

Green OA is an indirect approach to achieve fundamental change. It asks scholars to accept a little inconvenience for the sake of the larger principle. It asks them to deposit their papers into OA repositories and provide free access to publicly-funded research. It is hoped that this will gradually change the journal ecosystem and build pressure to innovate. It took dedicated developers, activists, advocates, and academic leaders over twenty years to promote this modest goal and create a movement that, finally, seems to have achieved critical mass. A growing number of universities have enacted OA mandates. These pioneers led the way, but only a government mandate can achieve the scale required to change the market. Enter politics.

Scholars, the creators and consumers of this market, should be able to dictate their terms. Yet, they are beholden to the establishment journals (and their publishers), which are the fountain of academic prestige. The SCOAP3 initiative for High Energy Physics journals shows how scholars are willing to go to unprecedented lengths to protect their journals.

Market-dominating scholarly publishers are paralyzed. They cannot abandon their only source of significant revenue (site licenses) on a hunch that another business model may work out better in the long term. In the mean time, they promote an impossible-to-defend hybrid Gold OA scheme, and they miss an opportunity to create value from author/reader networks (an opportunity recognized by upstart innovators). This business paralysis translates into a lobbying effort to protect the status quo for as long as feasible.

Academic libraries, which enthusiastically supported and developed Green OA, now enter this political arena in a weak position. The White House memorandum all but ignores them. Before complacency sets in, there is precious little time to argue a compelling case for independent institutional or individual repositories preserved in a long-term archive. After all, government-run repositories may disappear at any time for a variety of reasons.

The Gold OA approach of the Finch report is conceptually simpler. Neither scholars nor publishers are inconvenienced, let alone disrupted. It underwrites the survival of favored journals as Gold OA entities. It preempts real innovation. Without a mechanism in place to limit APCs, it's good to be a scholarly publisher in the UK. For now.

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?