Dead Library Lending

The University Library is a zombie, going through the motions and unaware it is dead.

You probably disagree. If you are willing to give me a few paragraphs, I think I can change your mind and convince you that digital technology has killed the institutional library.

To watch movies and television shows, digital consumers might use Amazon Prime Video or one of its competitors. These services each provide a basic video library, and they act as portals to pay-for-access channels and to pay-per-view movies. Users assemble their own video library tailored to their own specific tastes and budgets. Using similar services, digital consumers construct their own digital libraries for music, podcasts, games, and non-scholarly e-books and audio books.

For scholarly information, university libraries provide the same one-size-fits all service to the undergraduate pre-med student, the graduate student in geology, the postdoc in mathematics, and the professor of philosophy. When it comes to information needs, graduate students in mechanical engineering in Ohio have more in common with mechanical engineering researchers in Bangalore than with an Ethnic Studies professor with whom they share a campus.

Every university employs a team of librarians and web developers to build almost identical websites. They negotiate site licenses for content and software. They knit together the licensed software and content into a coherent and usable service. They manage catalogs, authentication services, journal databases, citation databases, institutional repositories, interlibrary loan services, etc. At every university, there are endless discussions and negotiations between librarians, faculty, and publishers, only to end up with strikingly similar collections of site licenses, software, and websites. The differences are local customizations, which are touted as a service to the local community. In reality, they are annoyances for scholars moving to a new institution or collaborating with colleagues at other institutions. Where they are similar, libraries are a duplication of effort. Where they are different, libraries waste time and energy on annoying customizations.

We came out of the paper era with tunnel vision, and we copied the paper-based library in the new digital reality. The institutional model belongs in the waste-paper basket of history. Individual scholars should make their own scholarly-communication purchase decisions for their own benefit. By eliminating the institutional digital-lending library, universities would eliminate the costs of purchasing and managing site licenses. These savings could reduce student tuition and raise researcher salaries with the understanding that, going forward, they are responsible to acquire the information resources they need.

This would end a system where scholarly information is bought with other people’s money. “Free” library services paid for by grants, charitable contributions, tuition, and endowment investment returns have distorted the scholarly-communication market into an unsustainable disaster. In a free market without middlemen, scholars would make their own cost-benefit analysis for each component of the scholarly-information system. This would not solve all problems and, undoubtedly, would create new ones. Nevertheless, the invisible hand has a proven track record of balancing cost, quality, and quantity of goods and services in most industries.

Librarians and academics have long been aware of the dysfunctional scholarly-information market. For the past 25 years, we have tried to get out of the library-site-license model. We tried various Open Access initiatives with the hope of nudging scholarly communication into a more sustainable model. None have succeeded. In fact, the Open Access movement has devolved into an expensive bureaucratic nightmare.

Librarians took charge of one particular Open Access model: Institutional Repositories that provide open access to the preprints of a university or a consortium of universities. Once upon a time, we hoped that these repositories would work together to provide worldwide open access to the latest research. However, effective federation of institutional repositories remained elusive. Local idiosyncrasies, introduced under pressure to conform to local demands and circumstances, made this impossible. After more than 25 years, only the most naive hold out hope for an effective worldwide interconnected repository network.

Other Open Access initiatives seek to eliminate the library-site-licensing model by having authors, universities, or funding agencies pay for the cost of publication up front. These initiatives have opened the floodgates for even more spending on more journals. Open-access journals are funded by so many organizations in direct and indirect ways that no one knows how much is spent on them. It is unlikely that some of these funding models should turn successful, sustainable, and become a dominant force in the scholarly-information market. However, if that should happen, it would kill the institutional library in the process, as it would eliminate the need to manage site licenses.

So, that is where we are. The conventional library-site-licensing model for scholarly communication is unsustainable and needs to be terminated. If open-access journals were to become the primary model, they would kill the institutional library. Institutional Repositories, the open-access model where libraries play any role, is infeasible. No matter the future of Open Access, the doors are closing for the institutional library. Meanwhile, the example of popular media is opening a window on personal libraries managed by individuals for their own benefit.

The University Library is a zombie, going through the motions and unaware it is dead.

Do you still disagree? If so, what is your rationale for continuing the institutional digital-lending library?

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.

Creative Problems

The open-access requirement for Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) should be a no-brainer. At virtually every university in the world, there is a centuries-old public component to the doctoral-degree requirement. With digital technology, that public component is implemented more efficiently and effectively. Yet, a small number of faculty fight the idea of Open Access for ETDs. The latest salvo came from Jennifer Sinor, an associate professor of English at Utah State University.
[One Size Doesn't Fit All, Jennifer Sinor, The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 24, 2014]

According to Sinor, Creative Writing departments are different and should be exempted from open-access requirements. She illustrates her objection to Open Access ETDs with an example of a student who submitted a novel as his masters thesis. He was shocked when he found out his work was for sale online by a third party. Furthermore, according to Sinor, the mere existence of the open-access thesis makes it impossible for that student to pursue a conventional publishing deal.

Sinor offers a solution to these problems, which she calls a middle path: Theses should continue to be printed, stored in libraries, accessible through interlibrary loan, and never digitized without the author's approval. Does anyone really think it is a common-sense middle path of moderation and reasonableness to pretend that the digital revolution never happened?

Our response could be brief. We could just observe that it does not matter whether or not Sinor's Luddite approach is tenable, and it does not matter whether or not her arguments hold water. Society will not stop changing because a small group of people pretend reality does not apply to them. Reality will, eventually, take over. Nevertheless, let us examine her arguments.

Multiyear embargoes are a routine part of Open Access policies for ETDs. I do not know of a single exception. After a web search that took less than a minute, I found the ETD policy of Sinor's own institution. The second and third sentence of USU's ETD policy reads as follows [ETD Forms and Policy, DigitalCommons@usu.edu]:

“However, USU recognizes that in some rare situations, release of a dissertation/thesis may need to be delayed. For these situations, USU provides the option of embargoing (i.e. delaying release) of a dissertation or thesis for five years after graduation, with an option to extend indefinitely.”

How much clearer can this policy be?

The student in question expressly allowed for third parties to sell his work by leaving a checkbox unchecked in a web form. Sinor excuses the student for his naïveté. However, anyone who hopes to make a living of creative writing in a web-connected world should have advanced knowledge of the business of selling one's works, of copyright law, and of publishing agreements. Does Sinor imply that a masters-level student in her department never had any exposure to these issues? If so, that is an inexcusable oversight in the department's curriculum.

This leads us to Sinor's final argument: that conventional publishers will not consider works that are also available as an Open Access ETDs. This has been thoroughly studied and debunked. See:
"Do Open Access Electronic Theses and Dissertations Diminish Publishing Opportunities in the Social Sciences and Humanities?" Marisa L. Ramirez, Joan T. Dalton, Gail McMillan, Max Read, and Nan Seamans. College & Research Libraries, July 2013, 74:368-380.

This should put to rest the most pressing issues. Yet, for those who cannot shake the feeling that Open Access robs students from an opportunity to monetize their work, there is another way out of the quandary. It is within the power of any Creative Writing department to solve the issue once and for all.

All university departments have two distinct missions: to teach a craft and to advance scholarship in their discipline. As a rule of thumb, the teaching of craft dominates up to the masters-degree level. The advancement of scholarship, which goes beyond accepted craft and into the new and experimental, takes over at the doctoral level.

When submitting a novel (or a play, a script, or a collection of poetry) as a thesis, the student exhibits his or her mastery of craft. This is appropriate for a masters thesis. However, when Creative Writing departments accept novels as doctoral theses, they put craft ahead of scholarship. It is difficult to see how any novel by itself advances the scholarship of Creative Writing.

The writer of an experimental masterpiece should have some original insights into his or her craft. Isn't it the role of universities to reward those insights? Wouldn't it make sense to award the PhD, not based on a writing sample, but based on a companion work that advances the scholarship of Creative Writing? Such a thesis would fit naturally within the open-access ecosystem of other scholarly disciplines without compromising the work itself in any way.

This is analogous to any number of scientific disciplines, where students develop equipment or software or a new chemical compound. The thesis is a description of the work and the ideas behind it. After a reasonable embargo to allow for patent applications, any such thesis may be made Open Access without compromising the commercial value of the work at the heart of the research.

A policy that is successful for most may fail for some. Some disciplines may be so fundamentally different that they need special processes. Yet, Open Access is merely the logical extension of long-held traditional academic values. If this small step presents such a big problem for one department and not for others, it may be time to re-examine existing practices at that department. Perhaps, the Open Access challenge is an opportunity to change for the better.

ETD 2011 and the Library of the Future

This week, the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD) holds its annual international conference in Cape Town, South Africa. Founded by Prof. Edward Fox of Virginia Tech, NDLTD is dedicated to making theses and dissertations available on the web. NDLTD is an organization where library and academic-computing professionals coordinate their activities and support each other as they develop programs to improve the quality of multimedia theses and the repositories that hold them.

The good news is that universities from across the globe are adopting electronic-theses mandates at an astonishing rate. Right now, over two million theses are available with a few mouse clicks. Check out the VTLS Visualizer or the SCIRUS ETD Search. By making their research available online, universities increase its impact. This is especially important for developing nations, who are in dire need of thinkers that solve local problems and contribute to global knowledge. That makes the location of this year’s NDLTD conference crucially important, both from a practical and a symbolic point of view.

The bad news is that thesis repositories are underfunded. Often, a thesis repository is thought of as just an affordable digital service with a fast payoff in research visibility. In fact, it is much more: it is a paradigm shift for the business of university libraries. Paper-era libraries collect information from around the world to be consumed by their communities. This paradigm is largely obsolete and must be turned upside down. As discussed in a previous blog post, “The Fourth Branch Library”, digital-era libraries should focus on the information produced by their communities, collect it, manage it, and make it widely available. Setting up an electronic thesis repository, helping students and faculty develop best practices, and helping universities through policy issues are exactly the kind of activities at the core of the digital library mission.

Repositories should be funded at a level commensurate with their importance to the future of libraries. We need to redouble our efforts to get out of PDF and into structured text, to enable full-text search, to improve reference linking, and to connect scientific formulas and equations to appropriate software for manipulation. We must capture all data underlying thesis research and make it available in raw form as well as through interactive visualizations. We must standardize when appropriate and allow maximum flexibility when feasible. A lot of work is ahead.

I congratulate the organizers of ETD 2011 for putting together a fantastic program. I hope the attendees of ETD 2011 will be inspired to build the foundations for the library of the future.

The Publisher’s Dilemma

The stinging critique of scholarly publishers by George Monbiot in The Guardian and on his blog describes the symptoms accurately, but misses the diagnosis of the problem. As commercial enterprises, publishers have a duty to their shareholders and to their employees to extract as much value as possible out of the information they own. If you think they should not own the scholarly record, blame the academics that signed over copyright. If you think site licenses for scholarly journals are too expensive, blame universities for continuing to buy into the system. Scholarly publishers are neither evil nor dishonest. They are capitalists exploiting a market they have created with eager participation of academia. Academics and librarians have been whining about the cost of scholarly journals for the last twenty years. One more yammering op-ed piece, or a thousand, will not change a dysfunctional scholarly-information market. Only economically meaningful actions can do that. Change the market, and the capitalists will follow.

By making buying decisions on behalf of a community, libraries eliminate competition between journals and create a distorted market. (See my previous blog post “What if Libraries were the Problem?”) The last twenty years were a chaotic period that included inflating and bursting economic bubbles, the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, several wars, and unprecedented technological advances in the delivery of information. In line with normal expectations under these conditions, most publishers faced an existential crisis. Amazingly, most scholarly publishers thrived. Is it just a coincidence their main revenue source is libraries?

Researchers need access to scholarly research. This legitimate need is conflated with the necessity of buying site licenses. A site license merely extends a rigid paper-era business model that ignores the unlimited flexibility of digital information. As digital-music consumers, students and faculty will not even buy an album of ten songs if they are interested in only one or two. Yet, for this community, their library subscribes to bundles of journals and joins consortia to buy even greater bundles of journals. Pay-per-view systems are expensive and painfully slow, particularly when handled through interlibrary loan. This information-delivery system is out of step with current expectations. The recording industry serves as an example of what happens in these circumstances.

It’s time to face the music. (I could not resist.) For an author, the selection of an appropriate journal and/or publisher is crucially important. For a reader, citations and peer recommendations trump journals’ tables of content, and book reviews trump publishers’ catalogs. I call on publishers to partner with Apple, Amazon, Thomson Reuters (Web of Knowledge), EBSCO, and others to develop convenient and affordable gateways that provide access to any scholarly article or book, from any publisher, whether open or paid access. Such an initiative might eat into site-license revenue, but it just might prevent the system from collapse and provide a platform for sustainable reader-pays models or hybrid models. Publishers have already hedged their bets with sincere, but timid, open-access initiatives. This is just one additional hedge, just in case...

In fact, I suspect many publishers have mixed feelings about site licenses. They generate high revenue, but they also come with high fixed costs. An extensive sales staff keeps track of thousands of libraries and conducts endless negotiations. Middlemen take a bite out of most proceeds. Every special deal must pass through an internal approval process, taking executives’ time and energy. There are serious technical complications in controlling access to journals covered by site licenses, because publishers must cede authentication processes to libraries and because they have no direct relationship with their readership. Publishers are caught in a vicious circle of increasing costs, more difficult negotiations, more cancellations, and increasing prices. I suspect they want a better system, one in which they can offer more services to more users. Yet, they find it impossible to abandon their only significant business model, even one at danger of collapsing under its own weight.

Change will happen only if universities take economically meaningful actions. Stop buying site licenses, let students and faculty decide their personal information requirements, subsidize them where appropriate, and let the free market run its course. (See my previous blog post “Libraries: Paper Tigers in a Digital World”.) In future blog posts, I intend to discuss methods to subsidize information that are more effective than buying site licenses and gradual approaches to get us there. Just as a thought experiment, consider the following: Cancel all site licenses, and use the savings to lower student tuition and raise faculty salaries. How long would it take for alternative distribution channels develop? How would prices evolve? How popular would open access be?

In a web-connected world, the role of libraries as intermediaries between information providers and readers is obsolete. As discussed in “The Fourth Branch Library”, libraries should increase their focus on collecting, managing, and broadcasting the information their communities generate. They should not be concerned with the information their communities consume.

The Fourth Branch Library

Today’s library is the result of twenty years of incremental changes: an institution buying access to information wholesale and restricting that access retail. As discussed here and here, the wholesale market for information is distorted and creates artificially high site license prices. Another expense is the inordinate amount of time staff spend on usage studies and community outreach to gauge collective information needs, negotiations with consortia that pool resources to obtain imaginary discounts from inflated list prices, negotiations with publishers and their agents, and internal library discussions. After they are acquired, site licenses remain expensive. As protectors of publishers’ digital rights, libraries spend significant resources restricting access at the retail level.

The time for incremental change is over. We must rebuild the library from scratch on a foundation of traditional library values. Here is my attempt.

The mission of the library is to serve the members of its community by:
1. Helping them create high-quality information,
2. Collecting, organizing, and archiving that information, and
3. Making that information widely available, subject to legal and ethical constraints.

This mission is steeped in tradition. Libraries of the antiquity were more about secrecy than openness, but their primary purpose was to archive locally produced information. The purest modern implementation of the vision I am proposing is the American presidential library, which collects, manages, and makes available the information from one administration. Public libraries routinely accept manuscripts and personal correspondence of authors and other luminaries. University archives preserve scholarly history. Many academic libraries have implemented various open-access initiatives and have set up databases containing publications of faculty and students (scholarly articles, books, theses, and dissertations).

This mission allows for specialization. Libraries are ideally positioned to add value to information produced by the communities they serve. A public library that serves a particular location may help its constituents with educational programs in information literacy. Other libraries may specialize in particular disciplines and serve communities that are dispersed worldwide. This is particularly the case for data archives, which require deep specialization.

This mission includes nonprofit and for-profit organizations. In this view, publishers are for-profit libraries. As such, they shoulder all the responsibilities of a library, including archiving the information under its purview.

This mission exploits the network effect. Through collaboration, libraries can create a worldwide network of high-quality information that is more than the sum of its parts.

This mission is critically important. We produce an exponentially rising amount of information that is poorly managed and in danger of being irretrievably lost.

For concrete examples, I could point to existing open access initiatives. Peter Suber’s The Open Access Overview is a good place to start. Most of these initiatives share the trait of being focused on disseminating information from a community to the world and letting the web take care of bringing the world to individuals. These are great initiatives, but I want to push the limits. I do not want to be boxed in by what is feasible today.

The largest producer of public-domain information is the government. Legal information, legislative records, and official government reports are readily available through established channels. Other government records, however, are more problematic. As a matter of expediency, officials tend to have a bias towards opaqueness. Impenetrable government records are managed by a hodgepodge of government agencies. The system hides problems ranging from bad judgment to corruption and complicates good governance.

What if we had an independent agency to manage the government’s records? This agency would create the systems to gather this information. It would decide the appropriate level of public access. By imposing standards, it would ensure that government records were machine-readable and discoverable. The infrastructure for such an independent agency is already in place: the public library system at the local, county, state, and federal levels. In its most extreme form, this independent agency could evolve into a fourth branch of government, one dedicated to transparency of the other branches.

As a practical matter, this may be an overreach, and more modest initiatives are more realistic starting points. However, considering the profound impact of digital information on our lives and considering that the information age is here to stay, we are forced to think big.

On the other hand, thinking small comes naturally. The latest innovation of the Los Angeles Public Library sets free the all-important Sony Music catalog, saving Los Angeles residents from the unspeakable burden of $1 song downloads. The Librarian in Black has a detailed critique.

<Note: edited title 8/26/2011>

Libraries: Paper Tigers in a Digital World

With every budget cut, libraries incrementally cut their services. User protests evaporate when they find alternative information sources on the web. When the cuts are absorbed without major problems, the stage is set for another round of cuts. The current economy exacerbates the situation by increasing the size and frequency of the cuts, but the real crisis is a version of a well-known scenario, extensively documented by Clayton Christensen in “The Innovator’s Dilemma.” (This book deals with profit-making enterprises, but in later work Christensen expanded his theories into the nonprofit realm.) When a disruptive technology invades a well-established field, the establishment is institutionally incapable of letting go of its existing business models until it is too late.

In this post, I am setting the stage for a proposed new mission for libraries. For this new mission to succeed, old business models must give way. This is the kind of radical change institutions commit to only when there is no other choice. The goal of this post is to make it absolutely clear: Libraries have no other choice. If this post strikes you as too negative, please be patient. Future posts will be constructive.

Today’s libraries have used technology mostly to improve operational efficiency. Databases replaced card catalogs and various indexes. Site-licensed journals replaced journal subscriptions. With the advent of e-readers, some libraries are replacing book acquisition with site licenses to collections of digital books. This is not innovative use of digital technology; it is a digital implementation of the paper-based library. Real innovation must address the core issue, how digital technology eroded the traditional library’s mission: distributing, subsidizing, and archiving information.

Distributing Information. Paper-based libraries buy or collect information (books, journals, multimedia, databases…) from various sources and make it available to their local communities. Does it really need explaining that the web is a global distribution mechanism for digital information? Digital information may reside anywhere and does not need local intermediaries for distribution. Buying information in bulk for the mythical “typical user” is rather incongruous in the era of iTunes. In terms of pure distribution, intermediaries only complicate the information landscape.

Subsidizing Information. Libraries are a source of subsidized information. Libraries and publishers perpetuated the same mechanism by which information is subsidized when transitioning from paper to digital. Libraries receive the funds from their controlling authority (government, university, corporate entity…) to acquire information on behalf of the communities they serve. With digital information, we have the choice to subsidize users directly. This would be simpler to administer and users would be able to acquire exactly the information they need.

Commercial systems like iTunes, the Kindle Store, and others can easily be adapted to accept direct user subsidies. The problem is not a technical one. The idea of direct user subsidies forces an uncomfortable renegotiation of the library-user-society compact. For current libraries, managing collections is a core preoccupation. Direct user subsidies may take many forms, and the libraries’ role is not clear. This might even ignite a debate along liberal/conservative lines whether information should be subsidized. No matter where one stands on this issue, it is a debate worth having.

As discussed previously, buying site licenses on behalf of users is an expensive method to subsidize information. Negotiating and managing site licenses is expensive. Tools that assist the users in navigating the library’s site licenses are costly and add to management overhead. Finally, the anticompetitive nature of site licenses distorts the free market and is likely to increase prices.

Archiving Information. Paper-based libraries are effective archives. Storing multiple copies in many different locations around the world protects against natural and political disasters of almost any magnitude. With appropriate technology and with regional, national, and international cooperation, libraries could safeguard digital information for the long term. Unfortunately, their role in archiving site-licensed information is severely limited, because site licenses provide only temporary and community-restricted access. (This is fundamentally different from paper-based information: libraries own the books.)

The public sector can develop the technological infrastructure for digital archives, but owners of information decide whether to participate and for how long (subject to contracts). We can only hope that voluntary efforts are sufficient for public archives to acquire important information before it is lost. This is not satisfactory for digital objects of cultural and scientific significance. It is too late for information that is already under private control. We must develop more opportunities for public ownership.

Digital technology has eroded the three pillars of the mission of current libraries. As is common with disruptive technology, existing business models are inadequate. Buying information to make it available to a limited community no longer makes any sense. Instead, libraries should focus on collecting and managing information from local communities and making that information available as widely as possible. This is a mission with future, and it is a topic for future blog posts.

What if Libraries were the Problem?

On July 19, Harvard University fellow Aaron Swartz was arraigned for breaking into a network closet at MIT and illegally downloading scholarly articles from a well-known database. Whatever his motivations, his approach was misguided, even bizarre. But if one understands the dysfunctional state of scholarly publishing, one cannot help but sympathize.

Because scholarly journals control peer review and publish research, they have significant influence on the academic appointment process. This influence has paid off for scholarly publishers. For at least twenty-five years, prices of scholarly journals have increased at super-inflationary rates. Every year, universities spend billions buying back the research papers of their own researchers. Adding insult to injury, most of this research was funded by the taxpayer. Academic libraries have been discussing the looming crisis since the mid-nineties and gradually embraced various attempts to provide scholarly research at no or reduced cost to the reader. These modest open-access initiatives have improved access, but they have not bent the cost curve of established journals. The business-as-usual mentality of scholarly publishers is particularly remarkable, in light of the fact that other publishers are facing a major existential crisis.

Most readers gain access to scholarly journals through libraries, which negotiate site licenses for packages of journals while balancing budget restrictions and demands from faculty and students. Libraries are between a rock and a hard place. There is a way out, but it requires acceptance of a fundamental fact: digital information needs its own distribution system. Site licenses are nothing more than a digital implementation of paper journals, developed so that the same acquisition departments and publisher agents can conduct business the way they have always done.

Site licenses sacrifice the essential feature of digital information: unlimited flexibility to divide up and reassemble according to personal and temporal needs. For almost every segment of the economy, the web has been a disintermediating technology. Yet, libraries remain stuck in the banal role of middlemen between their communities and publishers.

Site licenses are not only inflexible, they are anti-competitive. 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 buy both A and B. By standing between readers and publishers, libraries unwittingly eliminate competition.

Site licenses create price in-elasticity. With the cost of journals nearly invisible, readers cannot make an honest price-value judgment and they have no incentive to seek and/or develop alternative publications, such as open-access journals.

Site license pricing evolved from paper journal pricing without any basis in a real free market. Academic libraries were a captive market, and scholarly publishers were able to set prices so as to maintain established levels of profitability. Which other publishing business had that luxury during the web revolution?

Negotiating site licenses is expensive. Library staff monitor journal usage and conduct community surveys. Bundling (combining several journals into a “discounted” package) and consortium packages (combining the site licenses of different institutions) further complicate the negotiations. Staff spend countless hours studying usage, meeting with faculty, students, administration, consortium partners, and finally publishers’ agents.

Maintaining site licenses is expensive. Every change to every site license propagates to a multitude of library-managed databases, creating a maintenance headache.

Finally, site licenses do not allow for special circumstances. For example, a growing number of researchers want to use data-mining techniques on the scholarly literature. They need to download tens of thousands of articles, an action that violates the terms of virtually all site licenses. Ironically, actors that owe their existence to research are stifling it.

Libraries must get out of the business of buying and redistributing digital content. This only made sense for information on paper. Redistribution of digital information is done far more effectively on a global scale, as commercial services like Apple iTunes, the Amazon Kindle Store, and Netflix have proven. Because of economies of scale, national and international distribution systems (whether commercial or noncommercial) have the technological resources to provide information customized to individuals. Most libraries can only cater to the typical person of their community. Libraries would remain a resource for users that need help locating information, but there is no reason to couple the advising role and the purchasing role. New funding mechanisms that replace current library subsidies could put users in charge of their own information purchases. This would create a free market for scholarly information behind pay walls.

Meanwhile, freed from their role as middlemen protecting the publishers’ pay walls, libraries could concentrate on activities that add real value: collecting, maintaining, and disseminating the unique information generated by their respective communities. They would dedicate their resources on the dissemination of quality information to as wide an audience as possible.

POSTSCRIPT 1/21/2013: Aaron Swartz died on January 11th, 2013. The circumstances of his tragic suicide are well documented in the news. Having never met or communicated with him, I have no insights to offer on Aaron the person. I also have no particular knowledge about the legal case against Aaron. I can only express that the unnecessary death of this young brilliant mind touched me deeply.
I extend my sincere condolences to Aaron's family.