The Isentropic Disruption

The free dissemination of research is intrinsically good. For this reason alone, we must support open-access initiatives in general and Green Open Access in particular. One open repository does not change the dysfunctional scholarly-information market, but every new repository immediately expands open access and contributes to a worldwide network that may eventually create the change we are after.

Some hope that Green Open Access together with other incremental steps will lead to a “careful, thoughtful transition of revenue from toll to open access”. Others think that eminent leaders can get together and engineer a transition to a pre-defined new state. It is understandable to favor a gradual, careful, thoughtful, and smooth transition to a well-defined new equilibrium along an expertly planned path. In thermodynamics, a process that takes a system from one equilibrium state to another via infinitesimal steps that maintain order and equilibrium is called isentropic. (Note: Go elsewhere to learn thermodynamics.) Unfortunately, experience since the dawn of the industrial age has taught us that there is nothing isentropic about a disruption. There is no pre-defined destination. Leaders and experts usually have it wrong. The path is a random walk. The transition, if it happens, is sudden.

No matter what we do, the scholarly-information market will disrupt. The web has disrupted virtually every publisher and information intermediator. Idiosyncrasies of the scholarly-information market may have delayed the disruption of academic publishers and libraries, but the disruptive triggers are piling up. Will Green Open Access be a disruptive trigger when some critical mass is reached? Will it be a start-up venture based on a bright idea that catches on? Will it be a boycott to end all boycotts? Will it be some legislation somewhere? Will it be one or more major university systems opting out and causing an avalanche? Will it be the higher-education bubble bursting?

No matter what we do, disruption is disorderly and painful. Publishers must change their business model and transition from a high-margin to a low-margin environment. Important journals will be lost. This will disrupt some scholarly disciplines more severely than others. An open-access world without site licenses will disrupt academic libraries, whose budget is dominated by site-license acquisition and maintenance. Change of this depth and breadth is messy, disorderly, turbulent, and chaotic.

Disruption of the scholarly-information market is unavoidable. Disruption is disorderly and painful. We do not know what the end point will be. It is impossible to engineer the perfect transition. We do not have to like it, but ignoring the inevitable does not help. We have to come to terms with it, grudgingly accept it, and eventually embrace it by realizing that all of us have benefitted tremendously from technology-driven disruption in every other sector of the economy. Lack of disruption is a weakness. It is a sign that market conditions discourage experiments and innovation. We need to lower the barriers of entry for innovators and give them an opportunity to compete. Fortunately, universities have the power to do this without negotiation, litigation, or legislation.

If 10% of a university community wants one journal, 10% wants a competing journal, and 5% wants both, the library is effectively forced to buy both site licenses for 100% of the community. Site licenses reduce competition between journals and force universities to buy more than they need. The problem is exacerbated further by bundling and consortium “deals”. It is inordinately expensive in staff time to negotiate complex site-license contracts. Once acquired, disseminating the content according to contractual terms requires expensive infrastructure and ongoing maintenance. This administrative burden, pointlessly replicated at thousands of universities, adds no value. It made sense to buy long-lived paper-based information collectively. Leasing digital information for a few years at a time is sensible only inside the mental prison of the paper model.

Everyone with an iTunes library is familiar with the concept of a personal digital library. Pay-walled content should be managed by individuals who assess their own needs and make their own personal price-value assessments. After carefully weighing the options, they might still buy something just because it seems like a good idea. Eliminating the rigid acquisition policies of libraries invigorates the market, lowers the barriers of entry to innovators, incentivizes experiments, and increases price pressure on all providers. This improves the market for pay-walled content immediately, and it may help increase the demand for open access.

I would implement a transition to subsidized personal digital libraries in three steps. Start with a small step to introduce the university community to personal digital libraries. Cancel enough site licenses to transfer 10% of the site-license budget to an individual-subscription fund. After one year, cancel half of the remaining site licenses. After two years, transfer the entire site-license budget to the individual-subscription fund. From then on, individuals are responsible to buy their own pay-walled content, subsidized by the individual-subscription fund.

Being the middleman in digital-lending transactions is a losing proposition for libraries. It is a service that contradicts their mission. Libraries disseminate information; they do not protect it on behalf of publishers. Libraries buy information and set it free; they do not rent information and limit its availability to a chosen few. Libraries align themselves with the interests of their users, not with those of the publishers. Because of site licenses, academic libraries have lost their identity. They can regain it by focusing 100% on archiving and open access.

Librarians need to ponder the future and identity of academic libraries. For a university leadership under budgetary strain, the question is less profound and more immediate. Right now, what is the most cost-effective way to deliver pay-walled content to students and faculty?

On Becoming Unglued...

On June 20th, the e-book world changed: One innovation cut through the fog of the discussions on copyright, digital rights management (DRM), and various other real and perceived problems of digital books. It did not take a revolution, angry protests, lobbying of politicians, or changes in copyright law. All it took was a simple idea, and the talent and determination to implement it.

Gluejar is a company that pays authors for the digital rights to their books. When it acquires those rights, Gluejar produces the e-book and makes it available under a suitable open-access license. Gluejar calls this process the ungluing of the book.

Handing out money, while satisfying, is not much of a business model. So, Gluejar provides a platform for the necessary fundraising. When proposing to unglue a book, an author sets a price level for the digital rights, and the public is invited to donate as little or as much as they see fit. If the price level is met, the pledged funds are collected from the sponsors, and the book is unglued.

Why would the public contribute? First and foremost, this is small-scale philanthropy: the sponsors pay an author to provide a public benefit. The ever increasing term of copyright, now 70 years beyond the death of the author, has long been a sore point for many of us. Here is a perfectly valid free-market mechanism to release important works from its copyright shackles, while still compensating authors fairly. Book readers that devote a portion of their book-buying budget to ungluing build a lasting free public electronic library that can be enjoyed by everyone.

The first ungluing campaign, “Oral Literature In Africa” by Ruth H. Finnegan (Oxford University Press, 1970), raised the requisite $7,500 by its June 20th deadline. Among the 271 donors, there were many librarians. Interestingly, two libraries contributed as institutions: the University of Alberta Library and the University of Windsor Leddy Library. The number of participating institutions is small, but any early institutional recognition is an encouraging leading indicator.

I hope these pioneers will now form a friendly network of lobbyists for the idea that all libraries contribute a portion of their book budget to ungluing books. I propose a modest target: within one year, every library should set aside 1% of its book budget for ungluing. This is large enough to create a significant (distributed) fund, yet small enough not to have a negative impact on operations, even in these tough times. Encourage your library to try it out now by contributing to any of four open campaigns. Once they see it in action and participate, they'll be hooked.

Special recognition should go to Eric Hellman, the founder of Gluejar. I have known Eric many years and worked with him when we were both on the NISO Committee that produced the OpenURL standard. Eric has always been an innovator. With Gluejar, he is changing the world... one book at a time.

The PeerJ Disruption

The Open Access movement is not ambitious enough. That is the implicit message of the PeerJ announcement.

PeerJ distills a journal to what it really is: a social network. For a relatively small lifetime membership fee ($99 to $249 depending on the level an author chooses), authors get access to the social network, whose mission it is to disseminate and archive scholarly work. The concept is brilliant. It cuts through the clutter. Anyone who has ever published a paper understands it immediately. It makes sense.

The idea seems valid, but how can they execute it with membership fees that are so  low? When I see this level of price discrepancy between a new and an old product, I recall the words of the Victorian-era critic John Ruskin:

“It is unwise to pay too much, but it’s worse to pay too little. When you pay too much, you lose a little money — that’s all. When you pay too little, you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought is incapable of doing the thing it was bought to do.”
“There is hardly anything in the world which someone can’t make a little worse and sell a little cheaper — and people who consider price alone are this man’s lawful prey.”

On the other hand, we lived through fifty years of one disruptive idea after another proving John Ruskin wrong. Does the PeerJ team have a disruptive idea up their sleeve to make a quality product possible at the price level they propose?

In one announcement, the PeerJ founders state that “publication fees of zero were the thing we should ultimately aim for”. They hint at how they plan to publish the scholarly literature at virtually no cost:

“As a result, PeerJ plans to introduce additional products and services down the line, all of which will be aligned with the goals of the community that we serve. We will be introducing new and innovative B2B revenue streams as well as exploring the possibility of optional author or reader services working in conjunction with the community.”

In the age of Facebook, Flickr, Tumblr, LinkedIn, Google Plus etc., we all know there is value in the social network and in services built on top of content. The question is whether PeerJ has found the key to unlocking that value in the case of the persnickety academic social network.

For now, all we have to go on is the PeerJ team's credibility, which they have in abundance. For an introduction to the team and insight on how it might all work, read Bora Zivkovic's blog. Clearly, this team understands scholarly publishing and have successfully executed business plans. The benefit of the doubt goes to them. I can't wait to see the results.

I wish them great success.

PS: Peter Murray-Rust just posted a blog enthusiastically supporting the PeerJ concept.

The Day After

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

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

Virtually overnight, universal Open Access is a reality.

9:00am

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

10:00am

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

11:00am

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

12:00pm

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

1:00pm

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

2:00pm

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

Scholarly societies provide specialized digital libraries for every niche imaginable.

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

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

3:00pm

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

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

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

4:00pm

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

5:00pm

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

Moral

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

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

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

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

Annealing the Library: Follow up

Here are responses to some of the off-line reactions to the previous blog.

Simulated Annealing was explained in this post.

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“Annealing the Library” did not contain any statements about abandoning paper books (or journals). Each library needs to assess the value of paper for its community. This value assessment is different from one library to the next and from one collection to the next.

The main point of the post is that the end of paper acquisitions should NOT be the beginning of digital licenses. E-lending is not an adequate substitute for paper-based lending. E-lending is not a long-term investment. Libraries will not remain relevant institutions by being middlemen in digital-lending operations.

I neglected to concede the point that licensing digital content could be a temporary bandaid during the transition from paper to digital.

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In the case of academic libraries, the bandaid of site licensing scholarly journals is long past its due expiration date. It is time to phase out of the system.

If the University of California and California State University jointly announced a cancellation of all site licenses over the next three to five years, the impact would be felt immediately. The combination of the UC and Cal State systems is so big that publishers would need to take immediate and drastic actions. Some closed-access publishers would convert to open access. Others would start pricing their products appropriate for the individual-subscription market. Some publishers might not survive. Start-up companies would find a market primed to accept innovative models.

Unfortunately, most universities are too small to have this kind of immediate impact. This means that some coordinated action is necessary. This is not a boycott. There are no demands to be met. It is the creation of a new market for open-access information. It is entirely up to the publishers themselves how to decide how to respond. There is no need for negotiations. All it takes is the gradual cancellation of all site licenses at a critical mass of institutions.

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Annealing the Library does not contradict an earlier blog post, in which I expressed three Open Access Doubts. (1) I expressed disappointment in the quality of existing Open Access repositories. The Annealing proposal pumps a lot of capital into Open Access, which should improve quality. (2) I doubted the long-term effectiveness of institutional repositories in bringing down the total cost of access to scholarly information. Over time, the Annealing proposal eliminates duplication between institutional repositories and the scholarly literature, and it invests heavily into Open Access. (3) I wondered whether open-access journals are sufficiently incentivized to maintain quality over the long term. This doubt remains. Predatory open-access journals without discernible quality standards are popping up right and left. This is an alarming trend to serious open-access innovators. We urgently need a mechanism to identify and eliminate underperforming open-access journals.

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If libraries cut off subsidies to pay-walled information, some information will be out of reach. By phasing in the proposed changes gradually, temporary disruption of access to some resources will be minimal. After the new policies take full effect, they will create many new beneficiaries, open up many existing information resources, and create new open resources.

Annealing the Library

The path of least resistance and least trouble is a mental rut already made. It requires troublesome work to undertake the alternation of old beliefs.
John Dewey

What if a public library could fund a blogger of urban architecture to cover in detail all proceedings of the city planning department? What if it could fund a local historian to write an open-access history of the town? What if school libraries could fund teachers to develop open-access courseware? What if libraries could buy the digital rights of copyrighted works and set them free? What if the funds were available right now?

Unfortunately, by not making decisions, libraries everywhere merely continue to do what they have always done, but digitally. The switch from paper-based to digital lending is well under way. Most academic libraries already converted to digital lending for virtually all scholarly journals. Scores of digital-lending services are expanding digital lending to books, music, movies, and other materials. These services let libraries pretend that they are running a digital library, and they can do so without disrupting existing business processes. Publishers and content distributors keep their piece of the library pie. The libraries' customers obtain legal free access to quality content. The path of least resistance feels good and buries the cost of lost opportunity under blissful ignorance.

The value propositions of paper-based and digital lending are fundamentally different. A paper-based library builds permanent infrastructure: collections, buildings, and catalogs are assets that continue to pay dividends far into the future. In contrast, resources spent on digital lending are pure overhead. This includes staff time spent on negotiating licenses, development and maintenance of authentication systems, OpenURL, proxy, and web servers, and the software development to give a unified interface to disparate systems of content distributors. (Some expenses are hidden in higher fees for the Integrated Library System.) These expenses do not build permanent infrastructure and merely increase the cost of every transaction.

Do libraries add value to the process? If so, do libraries add value in excess of their overhead costs? In fact, library-mediated lending is more cumbersome and expensive than direct-to-consumer lending, because content distributors must incorporate library business processes in their lending systems. If the only real value of the library's meddling is to subsidize the transactions, why not give the money to users directly? These are the tough questions that deserve an answer.

Libraries cannot remain relevant institutions by being meaningless middlemen who serve no purpose. Libraries around the world are working on many exciting digital projects. These include digitization projects and the development of open archives for all kinds of content. Check out this example. Unfortunately, projects like these will be underfunded or cannot grow to scale as long as libraries remain preoccupied with digital lending.

Libraries need a different vision for their digital future, one that focuses on building digital infrastructure. We must preserve traditional library values, not traditional library institutions, processes, and services. The core of any vision must be long-term preservation of and universal open access to important information. Yet, we also recognize that some information is a commercial commodity, governed by economic markets. Libraries have never covered all information needs of everyone. Yet, independent libraries serving their respective communities and working together have established a great track record of filling global information needs. This decentralized model is worth preserving.

Some information, like most popular music and movies, is obviously commercial and should be governed by copyright, licenses, and prices established by the free market. Other information, like many government records, belongs either in the public domain or should be governed by an open license (Creative Commons, for example). Most information falls somewhere in between, with passionate advocates on both sides of the argument for every segment of the information market. Therefore, let us decentralize the issue and give every creator a real choice.

By gradually converting acquisition budgets into grant budgets, libraries could become open-access patrons. They could organize grant competitions for the production of open-access works. By sponsoring works and creators that further the goals of its community, each library contributes to a permanent open-access digital library for everyone. Publishers would have a role in the development of grant proposals that cover all stages of the production and marketing of the work. In addition to producing the open-access works, publishers could develop commercial added-value services. Finally, innovative markets like the one developed by Gluejar allow libraries (and others) to acquire the digital rights of commercial works and set them free.

The traditional commercial model will remain available, of course. Some authors may not find sponsors. Others may produce works of such potential commercial value that open access is not a realistic option. These authors are free to sell their work with any copyright restrictions deemed necessary. They are free to charge what the market will bear. However, they should not be able to double-dip. There is no need to subsidize closed-access works when open access is funded at the level proposed here. Libraries may refer customers to closed-access works, but they should not subsidize access. Over time, the cumulative effect of committing every library budget to open access would create a world-changing true public digital library.

Other writers have argued the case against library-mediated digital lending. No one is making the arguments in support of the case. The path of least resistance does not need arguments. It just goes with the flow. Into oblivion.

Annealing Elsevier

Through a bipartisan pair of shills, Elsevier introduced a bill that would have abolished the NIH open-access mandate and prevented other government research-funding agencies from requiring open access to government-sponsored research. In this Research Works Act (RWA) episode, Elsevier showed its hand. Twice. When it pushed for this legislation, and when it withdrew.

Elsevier was one of the first major publishers to support green open access. By pushing RWA, Elsevier confirmed the suspicion that this support is, at most, a short-term tactic to appease the scholarly community. Its real strategy is now in plain sight. RWA was not done on a whim. They cultivated at least two members of the House of Representatives and their staff. Just to get it out of committee, they would have needed several more. No one involved could possibly have thought they could sneak in RWA without anyone noticing. Yet, after an outcry from the scholarly community, they dropped the legislation just as suddenly as they introduced it. If Elsevier executives had a strategy, it is in tatters.

Elsevier’s RWA move and its subsequent retrenchment have more than a whiff of desperation. I forgive your snickering at this suggestion. After all, by its own accounting, Elsevier’s adjusted operating margin for 2010 was 35.7% and has been growing monotonously at least since 2006. These are not trend lines of a desperate company. (Create your own Elsevier reports here. Thanks to Nalini Joshi, @monsoon0, for tweeting the link and the graph!)

Paradoxically, its past success is a problem going forward. Elsevier’s stock-market shares are priced to reflect the company’s consistently high profitability. If it were to deteriorate, even by a fraction, share prices would tumble. To prevent that, Elsevier must raise revenue from a client base of universities that face at least several more years of extremely challenging budgets. For universities, the combination of price increases and budget cuts puts options on the table once thought unthinkable. Consider, for example, the University of California and the California State University systems. These systems have already cut to the bone, and they may face even more dire cuts, unless voters approve a package of tax increases. Because of their size, just these two university systems by themselves have a measurable impact on Elsevier’s bottom line. This is repeated across the country and the world.

Clearly, RWA was intended to make cancelling site licenses a less viable option for universities, now and in the future. When asked to deposit their publications in institutional repositories, it is an unfortunate fact that most scholars ignore their own institutions. They cannot ignore their funding agencies. Over time, funder-mandated repositories will become a fairly comprehensive compilation of the scholarly record. They may also erode the prestige factor of journals. After all, what is more prestigious? That two anonymous referees and an editor approved the paper or that the NIH funded it to the tune of a few million dollars? Advanced web-usage statistics of the open-access literature may further erode the value of impact factor and other conventional measures. Recently, I expressed some doubts that the open access movement could contribute to reining in journal prices. I may rethink some of this doubt, particularly with respect to funder-mandated open access.

Elsevier’s quick withdrawal from RWA is quite remarkable. Tim Gowers was uniquely effective, and deserves a lot of credit. When planning for RWA, Elsevier must have anticipated significant push back from the scholarly community. It has experience with boycotts and protests, as it has survived several. Clearly, the size and vehemence of the reaction was way beyond Elsevier's expectations. One can only speculate how many of its editors were willing to walk away over this issue.

Long ago, publishers figured out how to avoid becoming a low-profit commodity-service business: they put themselves at the hub of a system that establishes a scholarly pecking order. As beneficiaries of this system, current academic leaders and the tenured professoriate assign great value to it. Given the option, they would want everything the same, except cheaper, more open, without restrictive copyrights, and available for data mining. Of course, it is absurd to think that one could completely overhaul scholarly publishing by tweaking the system around the edges and without disrupting scholars themselves. Scholarly publishers survived the web revolution without disruption, because scholars did not want to be disrupted. That has changed.

Because of ongoing budget crises, desperate universities are cutting programs previously considered untouchable. To the dismay of scholars everywhere, radical options are on the table as a matter of routine. Yet, in this environment, publishers like Elsevier are chasing revenue increases. Desperation and anger are creating a unique moment. In Simulated Annealing terms (see a previous blog post): there is a lot of heat in the system, enabling big moves in search of a new global minimum.

Disruption: If not now, when?

Open Access Doubts

Science embraces the concept of weakly held strong ideas. This was illustrated recently by the excited reaction of the High-Energy Physics (HEP) community to a recent experiment. ("Measurement of the neutrino velocity with the OPERA detector in the CNGS beam", arXiv:1109.4897v1) If confirmed, it puts into doubt the speed of light as an absolute limit. The relevant paper is available through arXiv, which started as a HEP preprint repository and blazed a trail for Open Access. In light of the origins of the Open Access Movement, let us again be inspired by the HEP community and its willingness to follow experiments, wherever they may lead. Assessing the ongoing Open Access experiment, where are our doubts? I have three.

Is Affordable Better than Free?

All else being equal, open is better than closed. But… all else is not equal. A robust and user-friendly network of open scholarly systems seems farther away than ever because of inexpertly formatted content and bad, incomplete, and non-public (!) metadata. While there is always room for improvement, pay-walled journals provide professionally formatted and organized content with excellent metadata and robust services. The problem is cost. Unfortunately, we did nothing to reduce cost. We only negotiated prices.

What if we could significantly reduce cost by implementing pay walls differently? The root of the problem is site licenses. For details, see “What if Libraries were the Problem?”, “Libraries: Paper Tigers in a Digital World”, “The Fourth Branch Library”, and “The Publisher’s Dilemma”. Site licenses are market-distorting products that preserve paper-era business processes of publishers, aggregators, and libraries.

Universities can cut the Gordian knot right now by replacing site licenses with direct subsidies to researchers. After a few months of chaos, consumer-oriented services with all kinds of pricing models would emerge. Researchers, empowered to make individual price-value judgments, would become consumers in a suddenly competitive market for content and information services. The inception of a vibrant marketplace is impossible as long as universities mindlessly renew site licenses.

What are the Goals of Institutional Repositories?

Open Access advocates have articulated at least five goals for institutional repositories: (1) release hidden information, (2) rein in journal prices, (3) archive an institution’s scholarly record, (4) enable fast research communication, and (5) provide free access to author-formatted articles.

Institutional repositories are ideal vehicles for releasing hidden information that, until recently, had no suitable distribution platform (1). For example, archives must protect original pieces, but they can distribute the digitized content.

The four remaining goals, all related to scholarly journals, are more problematic. Institutional repositories fall short as a mechanism to rein in journal prices (2), because they are not a credible alternative for the current archival scholarly record. Without (2), goals (3), (4), and (5) are irrelevant. If we pay for journals anyway, we can achieve (3) by maintaining a database of links to the formal literature. Secure in the knowledge that their journals are not in jeopardy, publishers would be happy to provide (4) and (5).

A scenario consistent with this analysis is unfolding right now. The HEP community launched a rescue mission for HEP journals, which lost much of their role to arXiv. The SCOAP3 initiative pools funds currently spent on site-licensing HEP journals. This strikes me as a heavy-handed approach to protect existing revenue streams of established journals. On the other hand, SCOAP3 protects the quality of the HEP archival scholarly record and converts HEP journals to the open-access model.

Are Open-Access Journals a Form of Vanity Publishing?

If a journal’s scholarly discipline loses influence or if its editorial board lowers its standards, the journal’s standing diminishes and various quality assessments fall. In these circumstances, a pay-walled journal loses subscribers and, eventually, fails. An open-access journal, on the other hand, survives as long as it attracts a sufficient number of paying authors (perhaps by lowering standards even further). Financial viability of a pay wall is a crude measure of quality, but it is nonnegotiable and cannot be rationalized away: the journal fails, its editorial board disappears, its scholarly discipline loses some of its stature, and its authors must publish elsewhere.

We should not overstate this particular advantage of the pay wall. Publishers have kept marginal pay-walled journals alive through bundling and consortium incentives, effectively using strong journals to shore up weak ones. Open-access journals may not be perfect, but we happily ignore some flaws in return for free access to the scholarly record. For now, open-access journals are managed by innovators out to prove a point. Can successive generations maintain quality despite a built-in incentive to the contrary?

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.