Open@VT

It’s a simple question with a not so simple answer, and I’ll probably need a follow-up post to cover all the complexities. Publishers do their best to obfuscate prices through journal bundling (making it difficult to determine the price of a specific journal and also making it difficult to cancel specific journals) and through the use of non-disclosure agreements (NDAs). These practices further warp what is a badly dysfunctional “market” in which publishers have profit margins comparable to Google or Apple (30%+), all by taking free content from faculty members and selling it back to us.

The annual costs below are list price, not actual price. Through what seems to be a combination of NDAs preventing price sharing, and lack of a good internal price querying method, I’m not able to provide the actual (i.e. “negotiated”) amount that Virginia Tech is paying for these journals. So this list doesn’t include all journals Virginia Tech subscribes to (I’m told one or more of the AIP journals might make this top ten list) or accurate prices (either because we can’t tell you or can’t get them out of our system).

With all those caveats in mind, here are the ten most expensive journals that Virginia Tech subscribes to:

Open Access Week is coming up October 21-25, and Virginia Tech has a full schedule of events. This will be our second observance of the international event.

We are especially excited about the keynote address by John Willinsky, author of The Access Principle (2006) and director of the Public Knowledge Project, creator of open source software for scholarly publishing.

Other highlights are the faculty and graduate student panels (great discussions last year; this year’s participants still in the works) and our most recent addition, a panel on ETDs and open access, where the AHA controversy is sure to take center stage.

I’ll be posting more about the week as it approaches, but just wanted to get a quick notice out. I am co-chair of the event and one of the website editors, so please leave a comment or contact me directly if you have suggestions for the event or the information that we provide online. Hope to see you at as many events as possible!

There has been extensive commentary on the American Historical Association’s statement on 6-year dissertation embargoes and I’ve only read a little of it.

But I really liked Dr. Jason Kelly’s essay Open Access and the Historical Profession, which spurred further thoughts which may or may not have been mentioned in this debate (as well as enlightened me on the copyright perspectives of Leo Tolstoy and Woody Guthrie).

I doubt it is a new issue for the profession, but if one must publish a book to be a historian, and publishers will only publish books that will sell, why is saleability allowed to determine what history is written? Surely there is history worth writing that wouldn’t necessarily sell many books. In this sense, the market as a driver seems analogous to basic vs. applied research in the sciences.

For publishers, distributing knowledge is still a financial decision, and this means that the information contained in them is a commodity.

It doesn’t seem advantageous to a discipline to hide its research, or to limit it to topics with popular appeal.

Second, publishers of history books seem to be unaware of the increasingly prevalent “freemium” model. While this isn’t an exact analogy, because a dissertation isn’t the same as a book, it seems entirely possible that an openly available dissertation would drive book sales, not weaken them.

Finally, the difficulty in publishing a book today might have been ameliorated if the profession had engaged with open access earlier (or at least taken more interest in the serials crisis). It’s now generally accepted that the reason libraries buy fewer books, thereby putting university presses in difficulty, is that serials costs (particularly in the “big deals”) have eaten up an increasing percentage of library budgets. Libraries could afford a lot more history books from university presses if STEM journals transitioned to open access.

…a deeper intervention into the ecology of knowledge production and exchange is necessary.

Indeed!

On August 1 the Library Faculty Association at Virginia Tech adopted an article archiving mandate. Ballot choices also included a voluntary policy and no policy. The mandatory policy received 14 votes, the voluntary policy 10 votes, and no policy 3 votes.

The policy language originally followed the Harvard model, but the opt-out conditions were changed as a result of discussion. Some objected to sending opt-out waiver requests to the Dean’s office (or Dean’s designate), so someone suggested that faculty control access during the deposit process. Access choices are immediate open access (the default), delayed open access, or restricted (with metadata and a request button displayed). This aspect of the policy is similar to the immediate deposit/optional access policy advocated by Stevan Harnad (though deposit is not required immediately but by the time of publication). So the policy is a hybrid.

On a personal note, this was a long and frustrating process. The discussion lasted a year and a half (though that time spans most of two summers, when we did not meet). It’s hard to feel too celebratory when the debate is divisive and 13 faculty members are not on board. I never thought it would be so difficult to convince librarians that access to information is important, or that support for open access needs to be embodied, not just talked about. I’ve posted my 5-minute pitch preceding the vote.

The policy will be posted soon. Thanks to all of my colleagues who voted in favor of the policy. And though the policy is not strictly the one he recommends, thanks to Peter Suber for feedback that improved the policy and its associated FAQ.

Atul Gawande’s recent essay in the New Yorker, “Slow Ideas,” begins with this sentence:

Why do some innovations spread so swiftly and others so slowly?

It’s a fascinating exploration of the profoundly different takeup speed of anesthesia (fast) versus antiseptic practices (slow), and moves into recent experiences with the latter in improving birth outcomes in the developing world.

Open access, it seems to me, is also a slow idea. These excerpts from the article sound familiar:

This has been the pattern of many important but stalled ideas. They attack problems that are big but, to most people, invisible; and making them work can be tedious, if not outright painful. …remedies to them, all requiring individual sacrifice of one kind or another, struggle to get anywhere.

…people follow the lead of other people they know and trust when they decide whether to take it up. Every change requires effort, and the decision to make that effort is a social process.

Simple “awareness” isn’t going to solve anything. We need our sales force and our seven easy-to-remember messages. And in many places around the world the concerted, person-by-person effort of changing norms is under way.

Open access is invisible to many faculty, because the library subscribes to enough journals that encountering paywalls is relatively rare. It’s also invisible in the sense that faculty aren’t responsible for journal costs or ILL costs, and don’t see the connection to signing away copyright. It’s hard to see the benefits of OA if everything you’re doing now seems to be working fine.

Though open access now has significant momentum, it’s taken more than 20 years just to start having an impact. That qualifies as a slow idea. Open access requires individual sacrifice, at least for now, either in the form of examining one’s publishing contract for archiving permissions and then archiving, or in the form of paying article processing fees or perhaps publishing in a less prestigious journal.

This article also brings into question the open access outreach activities of libraries. If it’s lots of one on one conversations that are needed, then this library isn’t being as effective as it could be. I don’t think it’s necessary for everyone. No one introduced me to open access; I just did a lot of reading and became convinced it was the way to go. And some of the advocacy can happen in departmental meetings, for example (this report is really helpful and I wish there were more accounts of how open access successes were achieved on campuses).

I haven’t been very effective in convincing my fellow librarians, which is a prerequisite to implementing Gawande’s conclusions. I assumed that people learned the way I do, by reading, but those are probably in the minority. I’ve had very few one-on-one conversations, but I should have spoken to each of our 40 or so faculty. For campus-wide advocacy, we don’t need reports, keynotes, panels, and classes so much as we need a year-round sales force. And for that we need librarians who are fully on board.

(On an intellectual property note, regarding anesthesia: “Morton would not divulge the composition of the gas, which he called Letheon, because he had applied for a patent.” Fortunate for many that patent didn’t work out.)