Worlds of differences between publishers (economics 101)

Many librarians have never studied economics. Now that we are playing a key role in transforming scholarly communication, we need to know a little about the topic, at least as it applies to the stuff we work with. This is true whether we're in library management, collections, or at the front lines working with faculty on scholarly communication issues. This post is the first in a series designed to provide an easy reading introduction to librarians on this topic and for this purpose, called Economics 101.

Today's topic introduces the concept of the worlds of differences that exist between publishers. I will be using one of my favorite examples - since it is both so extreme, and from LIS. Emerald's Library Management, with a subscription price of Euro 11819 according to Ulrich's (that's 15,138 USD by today's conversion rate), costs about 190 times as much as ACRL's College and Research Libraries (similar in number of peer-reviewed articles per year), at a maximum non-member non-US rate of 80 USD. While this is an extreme example, it nonetheless illustrates an important point: the journals of the for-profit commercial sector can cost not only more than the not-for-profits, the commercials often cost a very great deal more.

This is important, because if we would like to see a healthy, affordable future for scholarly communication, we need to understand and support the often small, not-for-profit publishers, whether they are our own, as in the case of C&RL, or help our faculty members to see the importance of supporting such journals in their own disciplines.

Following are a few ways to think about this:

• When it comes time for renewal, budgets are tight, and of course we want publishers to keep their prices down. But does it make sense to ask the same sacrifices of a publisher of a journal that costs only $80 and another very similar journal that costs more than $15,000?

• If we thought about the important work that ACRL does and how low that $80 subscription ($70 in the U.S., by the way) is, and asked ACRL to double the price for C&RL, and negotiated with Emerald for a 1% decrease in the cost for Library Management, we would save money (1% of $15,000 is $150 - $80 for doubling the cost of C&RL). We would save $70.

• Or, why not ask Emerald to be just a bit more reasonable, and halve the price of Library Management to just $7,500 U.S.? This would save us enough money to pay for subscriptions to 94 journals like C&RL.

The irony is, that when we explain the dire straights of library budgets to publishers, it is the ACRLs of this world who are the first to step up and assure us that they will keep prices flat.

A simple way to keep this difference in mind in the field: when comparing journals or publishers and their pricing changes over the years, keep in mind the actual price - not just the percentage of increase or decrease. A 1% increase to C&RL is $.80; a 1% increase to Library Management is $150, almost double the full subscription cost of C&RL.

This post is the first in the series Economics 101. While the examples here are subscription-based journals, overall the purpose of understanding the economics is transitioning to open access. What's the connection? Publishers that have never gouged anyone, but have rather always kept their prices reasonable, often (like C&RL) have a well-deserved reputation for high quality. If they depend on library subscription dollars - let's help them to make the transition to open access. When I talk to people involved with many of these journals, what I hear is that many of them would love to make such a transition - they just need a little help, and if librarians step up to help them, many would welcome the help.

Cultural Studies: for-profit journals cost up to 10 times more than not-for-profit

Striphas analyzes the relative costs of journals from different publishers in cultural studies, and finds that the journals produced by commercial publishers cost from 50% to 1000% more (10 times the cost) than the not-for-profit university press journals, with the average price at Sage the highest at $853. Striphas' analysis on why addresses added value to the publisher databases (bells and whistles for searching), but notes that the main reason is because publishers can charge this much, because of the inelastic market. The section on alienation in this article is useful for those working on author's rights.

Citation: Striphas, T. (2010). Acknowledged goods: Cultural studies and the politics of academic journal publishing. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 7(1), 3.

Informa (Taylor & Francis etc.): profits up, majority renewing at previous high rates

According to the Informa 2009 Annual Report, the Adjusted Operating Margin (profit) is up to 25.3% in 2009 from 2008's 23.9%. From Highlights, Summaries, and Outlook: "the majority of subscriptions are renewing in line with previous high rates". As Executive Director Peter Rigby puts it, "”During a period of sustained economic decline across the world, our Publishing assets have performed exceptionally well". Publishing is now responsible for 72% of that 25.3% operating profit.

When the majority of customers worldwide are reeling from severe cutbacks from the global economic crisis, this is an excellent example of an inelastic market, not at all responsive to customers.

Freedom for scholarship in the internet age: OCULA spotlight

My powerpoint and detailed notes for my OCULA spotlight speech at the Ontario Library Association Superconference last week, Freedom for scholarship in the internet age, is available for viewing or downloading from here.

In brief, this speech begins with some thoughts on the purpose of scholarship. This question should frame any discussion of scholarly communication. While there are millions of researchers and at least as many research questions, it can be useful to think about a question like addressing global warming when evaluating potential change in scholarly communication. Note that it is important to remember that there can be a signficant gap in time (sometimes centuries) between when a concept is introduced, and when it is understood.

From the scholar's perspective, publisher-added digital rights management (DRM) is seen as a hindrance to scholarship - not a value add. Libre open access - free to re-use as well as to read - is only a small fraction of open access right now, but it is predicted that libre OA will be increasingly sought by scholars who experience its benefits.

Dealing with the sheer volume of information presently available (and still expanding exponentially) is one of the key challenges for scholars, librarians, and publishers alike. Three strategies for addressing this challenge are discussed. Reading less or filtering is seen as tempting, but not a good idea when examined against the purpose of scholarship. For example, if we find the volume of information coming from China overwhelming, it might be tempted to skip reading it; but if Chinese scholars are doing research that could help us to figure out a clean energy breakthrough, this isn't such a good idea. Writing less is a strategy that has more potential. Some of the pressure to write in quantity in academia may actually be counterproductive. Collaborating is a strategy well worth pursuing. To understand why, first picture the physics article with a thousand authors. Then picture another discipline, where a thousand authors each write one article.

Current tenure and promotion procedures do not reward collaboration. While there is much to be said for tradition in academia, there are times when tradition needs to be reexamined for the benefit of scholarship; and this is one of these times. Changing tenure and promotion procedures is not easy, nor is it the mandate of librarians; but I would argue that the good work librarians have done in the area of scholarly communication have opened a window for scholars to begin these broader discussions.

The window of opportunity is briefly discussed, from the identification of the serials crisis to the campaign to create change, to the exciting changes we see all around us - over 4,700 journals in DOAJ, more than 1,500 repositories in OpenDOAR, over 150 open access mandate policies, more than 22 million free publications through BASE.

What is really amazing about all this change is that it has taken place with virtually no resources. Evidence that there is more than sufficient funds, from academic library subscription budgets alone, to not only fund a fully open access scholarly publishing system, but save lots of money at the same time, is presented (a John Houghton slide on cost implications for a switch to OA for the UK Higher Education, and two of my slides on a global shift to OA by academic libraries).

The reasons why savings and not just status quo costs are needed are mentioned briefly, e.g. the need to move into support for open data and e-science, and address preservation of electronic information.

Next steps for libraries are presented, including keeping up the good work in building and filling repositories, hosting open access journals, and education on scholarly communication and open access. Consider setting up an open access author's fund, or transforming licensing language to reflect a shift in purchase (from subscription to subscription / full OA for our authors), and other means of economic support for open access.

Many thanks to OCULA and especially to OCULA President Nathalie Soini for the invitation to speak at OLA. I hope to find time to elaborate on some of the topics from this speech in more depth at a later date.

The scholar's copy

There has been much useful discussion on this list about scholars
as authors, and rightly so. Today, I would like to introduce a
view of what we scholars need nowadays as readers.

Increasingly, my reading is onscreen. The copy of an article or
book that works best for me is the one that I can download to my
desktop, and mark up as I please with highlighting and
commentary. I want to be able to re-copy to multiple folders if
this suits how I work. If I am using the same article for two
different projects, for example, I may want two copies with
different highlighting reflecting the most salient points to each
particular project. This ideal is a copy that I can search,
along with everything else on my computer, either for keywords or
key phrases in the text, or for my own notes. I can share a copy
freely with colleagues or students, with or without my notes,
either privately, or openly, on the web. I may want to create a
new version before sending, with customized notes to fit the
needs of my fellow researcher or student.

My access to my ideal scholar's copy is not dependent on whether
or not my library can afford a subscription, or whether I
continue at the institution with the subscription. If I submit
an article for publication, I can keep copies of the works that I
referenced.

This is true of journal articles, reports of all kinds, and
e-books, too.

This is one of the reasons why we need libre open access. So
far, only a small percentage of OA is clearly libre OA.
However, once scholars like me begin to experience the
difference, my prediction is that demand for libre OA will grow,
while demand for digital rights management (DRM)-ridden works
will decrease.

It would be most useful if search services would permit limiting
to libre OA (e.g. CC-licensed works).

Heather Morrison, MLIS
PhD Student
Simon Fraser University School of Communication
hgmorris at sfu dot ca

This message was first posted to the Liblicense discussion list.

Slowing down to protect the incumbents - or speeding up to protect the earth?

In this February's issue of the SPARC Open Access Newsletter, Peter Suber discusses some analogies between open access and clean energy.

One of Peter's discussion points is the issue of whether to slow down to protect the incumbents; in the case of clean energy, this would mean continuing to support environmentally harmful energy industries when clean ones are available, just because the incumbents are there; in the case of open access, this means slowing down to protect the interests of the existing publishing industry - interests which are not synonymous with the interests of scholarship, or of the public at large.

Peter raises some interesting points. My own take on the relationship between open access and clean energy: we need breakthrough research to move to clean energy, on several fronts - the hard science, economics, and social sciences research as change requires changes in attitudes and behavior. This is an urgent matter - we are running out of the old energy resources, and in trouble if we do not address global warming - and because it is an urgent matter, we need innovation in scholarship. We need our scholars to focus on innovating towards the breakthroughs - this means sharing results as early and as widely as possible. The kind of rapid transformation that led to mapping of the human genome in such a short time involved open sharing of information and a collaborative approach. This is exactly what we need to move to clean, renewal energy resources. This means that we need to rethink things like academic tenure and promotion processes; while academic traditions, in my opinion, have a great deal of merit, we cannot currently afford the luxury of taking significant time to consider change. We need to figure out how scholars can be supported to advance our knowledge in these areas in the ways that will lead to the most rapid possible change - not holding back knowledge to publish in the most prestigious journal possible.

Open and Evolving Scholarship

The internet has opened up new potentials for scholarship, potentials that we are only now just beginning to explore. As scholarship evolves, one of the signs of progress will be multiple versions. At first, some people will find this a challenging change; it is clearly different from the static print form. Because this change is part of the evolution of scholarship and brings both current and emerging innovations that will vastly improve scholarship, it is both necessary and desirable to embrace a variety of versions.

In a print-based world of scholarship, it was enough to have a single version of a journal article. There were significant costs involved in typesetting, printing, and mailing; while a few disciplines, such as physics and economics, have a history of sharing preprints even in the print era, most did not.

Already, it is possible for a research project to be published in numerous versions in a way that advances scholarship and makes it more accessible to all.

Here are some examples of how a research project can currently be shared in multiple versions. Not everyone will want to pursue all these approaches to sharing, and that is fine. Every discipline has its own traditions, every researcher their own comfort level with various types of sharing, and limited time.

Before the research begins: researchers can share their research questions, grant applications, or early plans. Benefits for the researcher include:

• the possibility of early peer review (if there is a problem with the question or approach - why not find out before you start the project, rather than after when the paper is done?)
• the possibility of finding collaborators to expand your research project (this has happened to me! - see Greyson et al,, University Supports for Open Access, Canadian Journal of Higher Education 2010, forthcoming); Taylor et al, Open Access Journal Supports (in progress)
  
• establishing priority

When the research is done: researchers can post openly a preprint, open data, conference presentation prior to final publication, or peer-reviewed postprint.

Benefits for the researcher include:

• the open access citation advantage
• possibility of early peer review when early forms (preprint, conference presentation) are shared
• other researchers can confirm results of rigorous studies when data is shared openly
  

Alternative versions and libre open access: in addition to these multiple versions of the research report per se, researchers can post alternative versions, or facilitate their creation by providing full libre open access including re-use rights. Examples of such alternative versions:

• abbreviated versions for the author's blog, scholarly newsletters or listservs
• audiovisual presentations (e.g. the YouTube version)
  
• translations into different languages, whether automated as through google's language services or manual
• translations into alternative formats to serve a wider variety of readers, e.g. audio or daisy versions for the print disabled
• translation into versions for lay or custom readerships, an emerging possibility for the scholarly-minded journalist or freelance writer (sometimes this will include the author)

In order to take full advantage of all of these potentials, and others of which I have not yet dreamed, it is necessary to let go of the idea that there is one single version of a research article. Approaches to citation need to evolve as well; this is not as confusing as it might seem. If there are multiple versions of an item - cite what you read. If there is another version you think readers should be alerted to, add this to the citation. For example, if you are cited a locked-down subscription version but know that a free version is available, add the URL to the free version as a service to your readers.

Multiple versions is not a new idea. For years, books have been published in multiple editions. There has never been a need to decide that one version was the authoritative version for all time, and there have been many an occasion when it was useful research to compare the differences between one edition and another.

Some useful examples of multiple versions in action: Living Reviews, an online open access peer reviewed service in which the review articles are kept up to date by their authors; the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, in which invited articles by experts are periodically updated (and archived on a quarterly basis for citation and preservation purposes); and Charles Bailey's bibliographies, updated frequently and available at Digital Koans. Jean-Claude Bradley and colleague's Useful Chemistry is a great illustration of sharing of research-in-progress.

Scholarly Communication class: open educational resources

Course materials for my scholarly communication class (LIBR559L at the University of British Columbia's School of Library, Archival and Information Studies) can be found on the course blog, CC-BY-NC-SA licensed. Posted so far: the course syllabus (including the list of readings, all freely available online), the journal creation exercise, and the Scholar's Biography exercise. I would be interested in hearing from anyone who decides to make use of / rework these materials, although of course this is not required.

The first time I taught this course the material formed the basis of my book, Scholarly Communication for Librarians, apparently published in June although I am still waiting for my copy! Two chapters of this book are open access: the Open Access chapter, and the Summary and Conclusions, featuring the main points of all the other chapters.

An Open Access Journal to Consolidate a New Research Field, and Learn How to Care for our Young

Nordisk Barnehageforskning is a brand new mulitlingual (often english) open access journal. In the introductory Editorial, Ingrid Pramling Samuelsson and Jan-Erik Johansson talk about how the field of Early Childhood and Care sector has expanded in recent years, so that now almost all young children are in some kind of care before school age. In contrast, research in this sector is just beginning, with most research in the form of thesis or works published by staff in this area. This new OA journal aims to consolidate research in this field. The editors talk about why it is important to have a local journal for Nordic countries, which share much in common with each other. Articles are published as soon as they are ready. The journal aims to be evaluated as a Level 1 academic journal in Norway. Other countries (such as Canada) have local means of evaluating academic journals, a potentially interesting alternative to evaluation by impact factor. Learning and writing about such journal evaluation alternatives would be an interesting research question.

Thanks to Jan Szczepanski for including this journal in his latest collection.

The trouble with metrics (for scholarship)

Anyone who has followed The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics for any length of time is no doubt aware that I like numbers. Measuring the Dramatic Growth of Open Access is one of my favorite past-times, along with calculating just how low the per-article cost of a scholarly peer-reviewed journal article can, or should, be.

It is really important to remember, though:

Numbers work best when they serve us, and not we them.

There are, in my opinion, serious potential dangers to scholarship (and to the world), if we move to a metrics-based assessment system without giving this a very great deal of thought. Here are a few of my comments on this topic, as originally posted to the American Scientist Open Access Forum:

Whether metrics are improving, and whether it is a good idea to base decisions about quality of and funding for research and journals entirely on usage metrics, are two separate questions.

In this post, I agree that metrics are improving with potential to advance our understanding of scholarship, but that there are dangers to be considered from over-reliance on usage metrics. Another idea I would like to introduce is cost-efficiency metrics.

As Stevan points out, "metrics are becoming far richer, more diverse, more transparent and more answerable than just the ISI JIF". There is indeed potential to develop much richer metrics, and this is a good thing, as it gives us a better means to research scholarship per se.

However, there are potential dangers to scholarship from relying too much on metrics. One important point is the distinction between popularity (or temporary importance), and real importance to scholarship or to the world.

Consider, for example:

Biology - species. There will always, of necessity, be a limited pool of scientists studying any one species in danger of extinction. Do articles and journals in these areas receive fewer citations? If so, what happens if we reward scholars and journals on the basics of metrics? Will these researchers lose their funding? Will journals that publish articles in this area lose their status?

Literature - authors. There are many researchers studying Shakespeare. A lesser-known local author will be lucky to receive the attention of even one researcher. In a metrics-based system, it seems reasonable to hypothesize that this bias will increase, and the odds of studying local culture decrease.

History - the local versus the global. A reasonable hypothesis is that historical articles and journals with broader potential readership are likely to attract more citations than locally-based historical studies. If this is correct, then local studies would suffer under a metrics-based system. (In the medium to long term, the broader studies would suffer, too, through lack of background that can be supplied by in-depth local research).

Medicine - temporary importance: AIDS, bird flu, SARS, are all viral diseases, horrible diseases and pandemics or potential pandemics. Of course, our research communities must prioritize these threats in the short term. This means many articles on these topics, and new journals, receiving many citations. Great stuff, this advances our knowledge and may have already prevented more than one pandemic. But what about other, less-pressing issues, such as the resistance of bacteria to antibiotics and basic research? In the short term, a focus on research usage metrics helps us to prioritize and focus on the immediate danger. In the long term, if usage metrics lead us to undervalue basic research, we could end up with more pressing dangers to deal with, such as rampant and totally untreatable bacterial illnesses, and less basic knowledge to help us figure out what to do.

This is speculation, but hopefully enough theoretical substance to illustrate that there are good reasons to think carefully about the impact of metrics-based systems before rushing to implement them.

Cost-efficiency metrics, such as average cost per article, is a tool that can be used to examine the relative cost-effectiveness of journals. In the print world, the per-article cost for the small, not-for-profit society publishers has often been a small fraction of the cost of the larger commercial for-profit publishers, often with equal or better quality. If university administrators are going to look at metrics, why not give thought to rewarding researchers for seeking publishing venues that combine high-quality peer review and editing with affordable costs?

More discussion on this topic can be found on The American Scientist Open Access Forum.