Over the weekend, Aaron Swartz, the computer programming
wonderkind, committed suicide. My twitterfeed, which is a combination of
academics, writers and technology experts, grieved at this loss. In this
Internet age, you can feel close with an individual that you only know from
their online writing and articles written about him. His death at 26 is a terrible loss.
Swartz captured my attention, after he broke into the
mainframe at MIT and downloaded millions of academic articles from the JSTOR
database. He believed that academic research was wrongly held behind paywalls
and that this information should be freely accessable to the public.
It is very difficult, if not completely impossible, for the
public to read academic research. Accessing this research requires a long
distance ride to a university library (good luck getting into the library
without an university ID card) or a substantial fee. The general public, writers,
and other professionals cannot make use of this research. This is especially galling,
because much of this research is subsidized by the public at state universities
or through federal grants.
Currently, universities support the production of research
and its final publication, especially in the social sciences and the
humanities. They provide grants and
course release time that enable faculty to conduct research. They house the
actual journals. Faculty sift through the articles and review the best content.
The heavy lifting behind academic research happens on the college campus.
Instead of creating profit, they create reputation.
Publishing companies take the finished product, typeset the
manuscript, produce a hard copy of the journal, distribute it to subscribers
for a fee, and then sell the content to a database company, like JSTOR. The database
company digitizes the article and sells the product to the universities
libraries. In the end, the universities, which created the content, must pay
huge sums to buy back their product.
By removing the two middlemen – the academic publishers and
the database companies — universities could save money, and academic research
could be freely available to all.
Instead of sending the finished academic journals to the
publishing companies, the journal editors should simply upload the articles to
a university website. The hard work of producing the content and the peer
review process has already been done. Few people actually read the hard copy of
journal, so there is very little need to produce a dead tree version of the
journal, collect subscriptions, and distribute it.
There is no need to disturb the peer review process, the
age-old system for quality control. Because the publishing companies own the
names of the journals, it might be necessary to create new journal names. But
with a strong editorial board and quality submissions, the new journals would
quickly replicate the status of the old journals.
With all the information online, there is no need to sell
the information to a database company to digitize the material. In the age of
Google Scholar, the search features of these library databases are irrelevant. I
can simply plug my key terms into any browser at my home computer and find all
the relevant articles.
There would be no cost to the university, because the
universities already produce this information for free. Universities and
individual professors currently receive no royalties for their work, so they
wouldn’t lose out by this system. Universities already have websites, where the
journals could post their content. Universities would not have to pay
substantial fees to pay back their own content.
By retaining the same peer review process, the quality of
the research would remain high, and faculty would not fear a loss to their
credibility. Most faculty would be overjoyed to find a larger audience for
their work. By eliminating the unnecessary hard copy version of academic
journals, universities would save money, a saving that would benefit the
students. Most importantly, all academic research would be available to the
public for free.
Apt. 11d 
Google Scholar cannot now handle the advanced search algorithms and metadata coding that the academic databases currently provide. Maybe Google can do that someday, but they will want to profit from their labors, too, and the costs may be less immediately visible to the institutions who want to use their search engines. Which will make getting the necessary funding from state legislatures that much harder.
Universities spend millions of dollars a year on their IT infrastructure: please identify the ones who are prepared, financially or politically, to spend millions more on the server capacity, maintenance, and upgrades necessary to host worldwide access to journals?
I agree that the academic publishing process is flawed, possibly broken. I am not convinced that JSTOR is the best target for your ire, and I utterly reject the argument that universities can become the new online publishers of academic journals at no cost. It was to reduce costs that the various academic journals signed agreements with commercial publishers in the first place.
There’s a vast library-science literature on the costs and benefits of the current academic publishing model and the working models for its replacement. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in this question. I also recommend you check with your local public library, because almost every state in the nation has a state-library-funded program to allow public access to academic databases and journals. Usually all that’s required is a library card.
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” It was to reduce costs that the various academic journals signed agreements with commercial publishers in the first place.”
The real costs have changed drastically as print died. It’s possible that the cost of a journal is mostly the intellectual costs (peer review, indexing, . . .), but someone needs to price it out, not just stick to the old models because that’s the way its always been done. If the profit makers (or the non-profits) like JSTOR are producing a service that people are willing to pay for, they should show us how and ask us how much we’re willing to pay. The companies are sticking to the old models because its likely that people will give up certain types of indexing for the cost and access.
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” It was to reduce costs that the various academic journals signed agreements with commercial publishers in the first place.” The costs were the printing, collecting subscription costs, and distribution. No need to do that anymore.
“lmost every state in the nation has a state-library-funded program to allow public access to academic databases and journals. Usually all that’s required is a library card.” I live in an extremely well funded town. It does not have access to JSTOR or most high end academic databases. Why? Because they cost $$$$. To get access to the academic journal databases, I had to get a special county ID card and then go to the community college, find the correct bureaucrat to get another special ID card, and then I was only allowed access at certain times. Silliness. Waste of time.
I have talked to librarians. But I have also talked to the many people who are editors of the journals to get a better understanding of the process. I also participated in the process many times as an author and a peer reviewer. I also worked in publishing for several years, so I know that end of it as well.
Up until just a couple of years ago, I conducted my own academic research. Nobody even uses JSTOR anymore. Everybody just uses google scholar or jumps around the internet to find the right resources. Really. Again, more silliness.
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Am I correct in thinking that in the sciences, it is common for journals to expect a cut of research grants to pay for the costs of publication?
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” I also recommend you check with your local public library, because almost every state in the nation has a state-library-funded program to allow public access to academic databases and journals. Usually all that’s required is a library card.”
Have you done this in your state? And if so, would it constitute an adequate replacement for the access you currently have? I find the suggestion off-putting, unless someone has actually done it (I believe Laura has, and I have colleague who has as well, in another state; my friend had to drive 25+ miles and found the process very difficult).
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The arXiv is a similar solution, and it’s growing. And then, people can (and often do) post their own publications on their personal academic sites.
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I see Laura’s argument and I definitely lean towards the kind of more open access she describes, but I am also drawn to Jody’s concerns. Funny, we were talking about this in class just now. I feel like it’s my job to take a topic students are really passionate about, like social media and privacy and open access, and encourage them to think about it in a more complex way. At first, they just want free stuff, but then they think about the costs involved, the jobs that are lost by digitizing. I was going on about Aaron Swartz and Reddit. I hope some of it struck a spark and they go find out more. This is really the next big paradigm shift in our society.
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I can see the complications of the argument that work produced at universities in general should be free — universities retain copyrights to their works, and many allow their employees to retain copyrights. Many public intellectuals (authors and others who produce work for general consumption) also work at universities. Should Katie Roiphe’s work be free because she works at a university? The line between a book for public consumption and one that is of purely academic interest isn’t black and white.
My main moral focus is on work produced by and for the federal government, which is not allowed to retain copyrights. Before Swartz was known for the JSTOR break in (which was a break in, in the physical traditional sense), he tried to free the PACER database, which is the electronic records of the federal court system. It’s purely wrong that those electronic records are not available to the public (and, when they are purchased can be freely distributed). Those documents are public and the court charges for them (at a profit) merely because they can (and, in fact, gets to decide the legality of doing so).
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“And then, people can (and often do) post their own publications on their personal academic sites.”
Right.
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People can use grant funds to pay for scientific publishing and one of the big arguments of the open access movement in science is to shift how the cost is paid, with the argument that it is currently paid for by federal government dollars anyway. Right now, journal subscriptions in science are underwritten by “overhead” costs paid for in conjunction with federal grants. So, the open access folks pay that as we move to journals which don’t require subscriptions, those same funds can be distributed to grants to pay for the costs of publishing. People’s Library of Science (PLoS) relies on this model, charging about $2000/article that is published.
The folks who object to the model are those who are unfunded (and thus currently search out journals that do not have page charges, though many that also charge subscriptions do) and people who don’t like seeing the charge come off their research budget (including the concern that switching to the model wouldn’t entail “moving” the funds currently given to overhead, but would just the disappearance).
Science that is funded by NIH does have to be released to a public database (PMC) within a year after publication: http://publicaccess.nih.gov/
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Check out http://scientopia.org/blogs/drugmonkey/2013/01/14/a-question-for-the-personal-website-oa-fans/
for a discussion by an anti-open access skeptic (in science). His argument is that folks can just request articles from the author.
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Yes, I have done this — the resource is called NC Live — and yes, it would constitute a reasonable (although not perfect, because they don’t spend as much so they have fewer of the esoteric databases) alternative to the access I currently enjoy at UNC-Chapel Hill. I can log onto the system at any time with my public library card, which was easily obtained.
f I were doing academic research after leaving UNC, I could return to the university and get access as a state resident, and then log on from home.
Seriously, I’m not around here much anymore but I wouldn’t be an asshole for the fun of it. I’m sorry that other states don’t have better programs in place but JSTOR is in fact a nonprofit and you’d be better of targeting Elsevier. There are indeed numerous alternatives to the commercial publishing system now in the works (my spouse will be stopping work as an asst editor with an Elsevier-published journal in March because his academic association has decided to break their affiliation with Elsevier and begin a new journal), and authors need to take a stand against giving up copyright (it’s often a violation of one’s publishing contract to provide PDFs of one’s published paper to people who ask, which is of course ridiculous) and I would bet money that the academic publishing world looks very different in the future than it does now.
But I am also not being an asshole when I say that it costs vast sums to maintain computer servers and the routers by which people communicate with those servers, and people have done the math on the savings from going paperless versus the costs of electricity for cooling the buildings and keeping the power on for those servers/routers, and if Stanford and UChicago and Harvard are doing the hard work of creating alternative storage sites for academic publishing, it’s in no small part because they are not dependent on state legislatures for their funding. There are no easy answers here and I’m sorry that my point has apparently been lost.
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Oh, and also, assistant editors — who manage the entire process of vetting the journals, finding reviewers, getting those reviewer to respond, etc — are paid. They are not paid much, but they are paid. And even digital journals require paid staff to publish their work online. And those servers and routers and IT buildings do not maintain or upgrade themselves. It’s simply not true that “going all digital” is frictionless or cost-free.
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Yes, assistant editors, who are often grad students, are paid, but they aren’t paid by the publishers. They are paid a stipend from the university.
The servers, routers, and IT building already exist. Yes, they would have to increase capacity to print the journals, but the univesity would save much more by not having to pay yearly subscription fees to all the databases. I think they also pay to subscribe to the journals, too. Insane.
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(a) In many cases (all of the ones I know about), assistant editors are paid by the journals, not by the universities. In economics and the sciences that I’ve encountered (as a temp at Yale in the late 1990s), these editors are always associate professors or higher. No one would ever advise a non-tenured professor, let alone a graduate student, to take on the arduous tasks involved. Not to mention the fact that no one would respect a desk rejection from a graduate student.
(b) People have done the math. The cost of increasing IT capacity — staffing, space, electronics — is not met by the savings in yearly subscription fees in many cases.
(c) Subscriptions to most journals are now part of broader agreements that include access to the underlying databases. This has led to many debates about the imposition of packages: librarians cannot choose to subscribe to XYZ journals without also buying access to the PDQ journals packaged with it. Librarians cannot decide they need print copies of X and Y but not Z. This is one of many ways that commercial publishers have used their control of the market to impose decisions to their advantage.
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I’m going to second some of what Jody says, but not all of it (for one thing, I’d be an asshole for the fun of it). Google scholar really is, at least in the fields I see, not yet an adequate alternative to the existing methods. For formal literature searches, you are probably ahead to hire a librarian to who knows how to do the search. You can do it yourself, but the learning curve is steep enough that having an expert really helps.
And scale really does differ once you get out of the social sciences. I’m not talking about electricity or servers, which I know nothing about the costs of, but I don’t think are all that much. Peer reviewers work for free, but it does not follow that peer review is free. If you are thinking about JoP or something smaller, you are talking about a very different level of use than if you are talking about JAMA or something. For the later, you can run peer review with a graduate student supervised by a put-upon associate professor but for the big medical journals, there is a huge IT infrastructure with staff people and offices and whatever else they need to send thousands of papers to tens of thousands of reviewers.
Granted, most of what JSTOR is dealing with is from the small journals. However, the publishers are playing in many different fields and don’t want to give up anything on the small titles that they may have to give up on the large titles.
Things are indeed changing, but nothing is going to become free. Instead, the authors (which is mostly the government paying indirectly) are going to have to pay to publish instead of the readers pay to read, as bj noted above. I also don’t think that the big titles will disappear into new journal entirely. Some of them will (see Elsevier), but at this point the launching of a new open access journal takes too much effort to separate from spam and submitting to one involves too much risk for somebody who needs a paper to get or keep a job.
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The argument that JSTOR is not-for-profit is disingenuous; as we know, ClubMed is also not-for-profit. The question under discussion is whether the databases/journals should be available in a subscriber pays model in a world where books/newspapers/journals/databases are no longer in physical form (which are limited access and expensive). JSTOR & Elsevier are both wedded to that model, so working to change the model involves opposing both of their policies.
We had this discussion when talking about book publishers/editors, too, and the main question is how do we value the services these organizations are providing (peer reviewing, editing, formatting, servers) and, in the case of academic publishing, who is providing that service, and how are they being paid for it. I find the vague defenses that Elsevier or JSTOR is providing lots of value while rigidly sticking with the old subscriber pays model to be unconvincing. I also find the “lost jobs” argument to be unconvincing (technology changes jobs and I’m not willing to stay stuck in old technology in order to save jobs).
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There is definitely a need for better and more easily accessible information. My last pregnancy both very complicated and the first one where I used the internet much for medical information gathering, and it was an eye-opener. For a layperson like myself with a layperson’s web skills, the websites that pop up are either 1) bland and basic content farms 2) forums with lots of typo-ridden anecdotes. I found the subchorionic hematoma forums very helpful, but there is a darker side to the pregnancy forums, as I’ve seen both from Amy Tuteur’s site (www.skepticalob.com) and from personal observation. The dark side is that the “support” offered often consists of sharing misinformation and telling expectant mothers to ignore their doctors’ advice, often in very dangerous circumstances. (For instance, a pregnant woman may be full term with complications, her doctor is urging an induction, and an internet chorus of strangers who’ve never laid eyes on her will be telling her to trust her body and trust that her baby knows when to be born.) Paradoxically, the internet has the potential to harm maternal and baby health and well-being.
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Amy brings up the reason why I’m passionate about this issue. The taxpayer is funding much of the research and work, on say, leukemia. When my child had ankylosed teeth, I read the reserach reports on teeth before making our decision about how to proceed. That a parent of a child with leukemia doesn’t have access to the work produced by their taxpayer dollars is wrong. And, they shouldn’t have to walk 25 miles to find it. The work belongs to them (hence the constitutional restriction against copywriting the work of federal government).
I think our leverage is limited in other instances, but federally funded research, and reserach funded by not-for-profit charities (i.e. the american cancer institute) should be made available to the public for whom the work was produced. There’s a moral imperative. It’s only the second question, to figure out how to pay for everything most sensibly.
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I am going to try to re-state my argument and then get back to my real work of the day. I must admit that I made my case poorly, but I hope you will give me a second shot.
First, JSTOR is not only non-profit but not operating under the same business model as Elsevier. They are, for the most part, trying to increase access to their databases while also covering their costs. They were at the forefront of digitizing materials in the 1990s precisely because they did want to increase access, and they have said as a group that they were sorry to be drawn into the mess about content. The fact is, it costs them real money to maintain their collective servers (and they realize real economies of scale when they collect all the very small journals together), and they have to cover their costs in some way. I just don’t think that, if you want to highlight the evils of the current content/information/journal model, you go after JSTOR.
Second, no one in academia thinks the current journal-access model works. Librarians want free and open access to information; they have spent at least the last five years trying to find alternatives to Elsevier et al. At the least, university and public libraries cannot cover their operating costs, and the journal cost model makes things worse. Every year, subscription charges rise, sometimes by five and six figures at a time, and because of the existing models, if libraries stop paying for a subscription, they not only lose next year’s content, they lose access to all the past digital content for which they’ve already paid. As bj and laura have pointed out, we the public paid for a lot of that content via public grants. The whole situation is ridiculous and untenable.
That all having been said, if the solution were easy — if all it required was that universities start publishing open-access journals and everyone stopped needing metadata because hey, Google will take care of that — then the solution would already have been adopted. No one on the budgetary side of this likes the status quo; no one is just doing what’s always been done because it hurts too much to think about change. It hurts more to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in database subscriptions.
People are hard at work trying to find a way to change the system but it will take time, effort, and serious investments in money. How much extra cash do your state universities have on hand? Ours have had double-digit percentage cuts in budgets for the past five years. And like it or not, legislators will pay something (albeit less and less) for library services but they tend to think that universities are spending too much on “overhead” already, so getting them to understand that spending money on IT and network access is worth it hasn’t necessarily been wildly successful.
There’s also the problem of tenure, publishing, and journal prestige. Assistant professors have a lot of problems, and adjuncts have more. Asking them to stop publishing in the high-impact factor journals and to take a chance on open access requires a campaign. It requires tenure committees (especially the ones at the university level, who don’t make the time to understand discipline-specific publishing trends) to change their paradigms. This takes time. No one knows if it will work. And we really haven’t discussed the medical and hard sciences at all, fields where fast turnaround times and high levels of scrutiny increase the publication costs.
So the situation sucks. The solutions are not clear-cut or easy. And in the meantime, it’s worth checking to see if your local librarians have any work-arounds for you, because librarians hate this situation. They hate that their subscriptions often require them to deny remote access to non-affiliated patrons. They hate that they can’t afford to buy the journals their patrons need. As a group, they are trying everything they can to change the situation.
Unfortunately, just having universities take back the process does not necessarily top anyone’s list for the most workable alternative. Whether you find the cost arguments compelling or not depends, I guess, on the numbers you use.
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https://www.recapthelaw.org/2012/01/10/recap-featured-in-xrds-magazine/#more-657
is the link to an article about the current attempts to “free” the PACER archive (remember that the underlying info in PACER, electronic court records, is not under copyright). The authors discuss the costs of electronically publishing the information, the costs charged by the court (which then uses the revenue raised for other projects), and the potential for developing *better* search engines.
PACER is hard to use (court records are stored in silos, the information is hard to search), but, apparently, a group of students were able to produce a better search engine in a semester’s work. We’re seeing a significantly changing world in how information can be accessed and searched, and the old systems not only limit access to information, but in some cases, are actively worse methods of searching, that don’t take into account newer methods available.
Google, has capitalized on developing these new search methods (and, frankly, does a pretty good job of it). Many of them can also be applied to formal databases, as the Princeton students are showing with their new search engines for PACER. Some simple examples, of things that are possible now, that change search fundamentally, are the ability to do searches across large ranges of sources, to do linkage analyses across texts (i.e. how many common words are used in two documents), and just the sheer power of computers (which allow us to do wasteful searches).
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Thanks, Jody, for your lengthy and measured comment. I need to move on, so just a couple of quick responses.
I did target JSTOR in my first piece, but only because I’m more familiar with that database which concentrates on social science research. It is certainly not profitting as much as Elsevier et al. However, I do think that most of its efforts are silly today and do increase the costs to the university. I could not even find accurate numbers of its subscription costs, because libraries have to sign confidentiality agreements that keep those numbers under wraps.
I do think that you’re absolutely right about why change isn’t happeneing. There is no incentive for academics, the creators of the content, to make changes. They aren’t paid directly for their work, but they are paid in reputation and that can be traded in for more prestigous positions and more money. Maybe the prestige of the journal will be damaged f they put a new name to their journal and if they stop the print version. That’s way too risky.
And there are jobs at stake.
After I wrote the first article, I recieved a ton of e-mails from journalists expressing their frustration with the system. They have also tried to get access to articles, which they wanted to cite in an article, but were frustrated by the paywall.
The system isn’t working for anybody.
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One more small data point. I’m one of the editors of a small but well-established humanities journal. It’s entirely self-supporting: the university that houses it provides not a penny in support. And it’s published not by a commercial outfit but by a university press, which makes a little profit from doing so (which helps to subsidize its books, which tend to make losses). Our subscription prices are not bankrupting anybody. And our peer review and the developmental editing it makes possible work pretty well, thanks to the generosity of referees all over the world (the web makes it easier than ever to find the real experts)and the efficiency of our one full-time and one part-time employee. None of this is to say that the present system is the best one or the only one, but just that I recognize the conditions Jody describes as the ones I work with, and that the discussion on the web tends to conflate my kind of small, low-cost journal with the STEM ones, which function very differently.
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I could not even find accurate numbers of its subscription costs, because libraries have to sign confidentiality agreements that keep those numbers under wraps.
I was able to find JSTOR costs for public institutions including public libraries, museums, non profits, high schools etc. The fees vary slightly based on the type of institution so you have to look at each category separately. For public libraries, it appears they range from $750-$15,000/year, depending on the various factors. I didn’t easily find costs for university libraries. There also appears to be a myJSTOR program, which allows individuals unaffiliated with any institution to register and read some content for free, though not the most up to date stuff.
http://about.jstor.org/fees/13006#tab-fees
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I’m most familiar with small, but well-established journals in the social sciences, which I’m sure work like a humanities journal. The university, the university system as a whole, and the public do support research and academic journals, although not always in a direct fashion.
Some examples:
– If the university provides course release time to the editor, then they have to pay someone (like an adjunct) to teach that course.
– the university may provide office space, computers, postage, and other office support for the journal.
– the unversity may provide helpers and pay them with work-study money. (A number of my friends have held these jobs.)
– the university may provide the editor with a small stipend.
– Universities expect t-t faculty to do peer reviews for other journals. It’s part of the service expectations for tenture. So, it’s a job responsibility. If a journal uses a reviewer from a state university, then public money indirectly supports their effort.
– Many grants to do the research come from the public.
– Sabbaticals to do the research is supported by the university system.
– Even small university presses sell the rights to the journal articles to databases, like JSTOR. University libraries have to pay sizable fees to get access to it.
I am not suggesting that the public and the university systems should not be supporting research and academic journals. Far from it. I just think that if the public is paying for it, they should get access to it. Tony, we want to read what’s in your journal! That’s a good thing, right? I think that access can be improved without a huge problem to the individual faculty or even the colleges.
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Right, that’s what I was wondering, too, why universities can’t just re-direct the resources they currently spend into making the “small/low cost” journals accessible to everyone. That doesn’t work for Elsevier (because there’s no reason for universities to pay for the profit to Elsevier). But, for the small journal, if their current subscribers are mostly universities, why won’t the system work by having the universities give those resources to the journal and making the journal available to everyone? True, the universities would have to collaborate. But, they could.
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I am a university librarian who is very familiar with these issues. What Laura is basically describing is Open Access. here’s a web page for those interested: http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/overview.htm
One thing that would really really help is if more faculty, and I mean the tenured faculty like Professor Grafton, would support open access and OA journals. OA does not meet “not peer reviewed” It is great that there’s a groundswell of support from librarians and assistant professors (who will eventually be the tenured faculty of tomorrow, so that’s important) but we need the tenured professors at each university and the many science professors to really support this and tell their deans and IT staff this is important. And then put their papers in either university or discipline specific repositories (SSRN is a good one for social sciences), look at their contracts carefully, and push back! Urge your associations to publish OA journals.
And I’ll just say it is not a matter of putting it “on a university web page”. Those go in and out, URLS change, people leave. In three years no one can find your papers. You need either a journal publishing system or a proper repository that handles born-digital access and archiving. I’m sorry to say those are not cheap. I actually don’t think the big issue is worldwide access (as opposed to just on the U network) But I disagree with Jody in that I think it WILL happen. I think it is partly unavoidable. the change I’ve seen in the last 5 year is heartening. There are a lot of alternative ideas in university publishing and I think in 10 years, people will be thinking about scholarly research differently.
But remember: Elsevier has serious lobbying power. And they give money to congresspeople.
I share the concern that JSTOR is not really the problem here. But I also think that university staff of all kinds should remember that these differences with JSTOR and Elsevier are clearly not that important to the public, who rightly just want to see the products of their taxes. Honestly, I wish more citizens were as engaged as Laura is.
I’m not quite sure what the general public could do, honestly. That’s an interesting question.
(also how awesome is it that Tony Grafton reads Laura’s blog? very awesome).
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OK, had to add this which I got over the wire. Doesn’t apply to the non-academic public, but its interesting. And this is written by a professor. http://phylogenomics.blogspot.com/2013/01/10-things-you-can-do-to-really-support.html
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Laura’s argument, which is largely my own, doesn’t need to be in tension with Jody’s points.
The simple answer is that academic institutions acting at a massive consortial level should and can assume all the costs of supporting the servers and storage, interface design, forward-migratability and so on that the publishers and services like JSTOR provide now. That’s where we have to go. We even have an underutilized organizational tool that could be incorporated into such a consortial strategy: university presses.
I feel pretty confident that there would be net savings from putting the major publishers like Elsevier out of the loop. Not just in a single year, but it would remove a major sort of risk exposure in academic budgets, the possibility that a vendor is going to suddenly jump the cost of a resource that you simply have to have. We’d only be dealing with the real cost increases involved in the technology and labor connected to digital publication rather than unpredictable rents.
Even if the net result was more expensive (which again, I seriously doubt) it is worth paying those costs because it’s the only way academia can live up to root-level ethical commitments that are intrinsic to the idea of scholarly production. Whether or not the public pays directly, the public should be entitled to read it. We want that to happen, or we should.
Open-access controlled directly by scholarly institutions is also the only regime that actually returns to most academic authors what they’re really seeking through publication. Very, very few of us receive direct profits through publication. Most of us receive reputation. We don’t receive that unless our work circulates and is used as widely and freely as possible. So we’re giving our work away to companies that then keep it from circulating, which is insane on pure self-interest grounds.
Ultimately most of what’s wrong with JSTOR doesn’t originate with JSTOR: it is that JSTOR is beholden to Elsevier et al. But if we moved future publication inside of academia via a consortium, JSTOR would be relevant only as legacy unless the expertise of its employees and its experience with interface and metadata were imported or purchased for use by the new publication structure.
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Thanks, Tim. I loved your post on your blog about this. Read it yesterday and meant to link to it.
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I’m in complete sympathy with making what we publish more available. But the university where I work, and the university where my journal is based, don’t in fact offer the sorts of support Laura mentions (we pay rent for our office, we pay for our graduate assistant’s time, we don’t get stipends or release time for our work, etc.).
On a larger scale, I’m afraid my experience makes me doubt that Tim’s answer–with which I have great sympathy–is as practical, in the near term, as it is simple.
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Professor Grafton, your voice is an important one for those of us (like me) who are humanists. Have you addressed this topic elsewhere. I think OA is not practical for SS&H. I’d love to hear what you think. Thank you!
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I don’t think it will happen in the near term either. Or at least, not all of it. Just because some alternative is better for most involved and would almost certainly be chosen if the system was created from scratch today does not mean you can get to there from here easily. Institutions, path dependency, sunk costs, and the like are things that good social scientists shouldn’t assume away as if they were economists or otherwise pointless.
Some fields are apparently moving toward ArXive and others toward pay to publish, as opposed to pay to read. I know it will be different in a few years, but I wouldn’t assume the future shape of the system is self-evident.
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Basically, open access is great but I need (or more precisely my bosses who makes these decisions need) to get published in something peer reviewed and indexed in the right places. There are open-access journals that meet those criteria, but those journals are not usually cited nearly as frequently as are therefore less prestigious. Sending a first-rate report to such a journal would maybe not hurt somebody well established, but the well established people are nearly always writing with a group of junior people who need grant money to keep employed. If your best paper went to a journal younger than some bottles of wine, the people reviewing the grant are going to tend to assume that’s because your best paper wasn’t good enough to get into a better journal. If they read the paper and know it is great, they still may to be reluctant to send several [hundred] thousand dollars to somebody who won’t try to seek the most prestigious journal. People at grant-giving bodies have careers also and reporting that one of your awardees was just published in JAMA is much better for fundraising/making assistant-deputy-whatever than if the research was published somewhere that sends people to google to see what it is.
And regardless of what journal you publish in, in one year the article will be publicly available (because of federal rules). It’s a great deal of risk for a very small gain in some fields.
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The reason it won’t happen is that universities and colleges (and perhaps faculty) overvalue their sovereignty over small things and undervalue their shared interests and values.
We have to go beyond having sympathy for the idea of a wider readership. We don’t have sympathy for the idea of proper citation and academic honesty, sympathy for proper procedure in laboratories, archives or fieldwork, sympathy for delivering educational value to our students in return for the high costs we impose on them.
Free access to scholarship for anyone interested in its content is fundamental to the idea of scholarship. In pre-digital terms, libraries and archives were as good as we could do in providing that access. We can do better now. So we have to do better now. There’s no reason why something like the Journal of the History of Ideas couldn’t be published in the fashion of the journal Republics of Letters. That kind of move is readily within our grasp, if only we could invest collectively in the cataloging, metadata, migratability and so on that Project MUSE or JSTOR provide for journals behind their walls.
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For those who think that OA is not for humanists, I would recommend looking at PressForward, a new press started by the great folks at George Mason and also I’d look at MediaCommons Press. Both are trying out new forms of peer review and open publishing in the humanities. Professor Grafton is right, we need more creative ways to support graduate students and assistants. But I think they are out there. The Alt-Ac movement is showing that a lot of people know there are no jobs in academia and are willing to gain other skills.
I totally agree with everything Prof. Burke said and I look forward to him continuing to convince others as he has done for many years.
Libraries are very good at working collectively and we have to turn our attention to working not just on collectively cataloging books but providing metadata and access to other kinds of resources. And many are working in this area…baby steps to be sure but those projects are often more successful than a grand splash that dries up when the funding does.
Most of all we need optimism and a can-do spirit. I really believe we are moving in this direction and its best to skate to where the puck is heading.
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What Jen said in a previous comment… For there to be a shift towards open access, the movement has to come not from younger faculty and newly established journals. It has to come from senior faculty and the most respected journals. If JAMA, renamed itself as JAMS or whatever, and everybody knew that it was still JAMA, and published a free, online edition, then younger faculty would feel comfortable putting their hardwork in its hands.
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JAMA was a bad example since it is so prestigious and has other sources of income (AMA, ads). The publisher/faculty dynamic doesn’t really apply.
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Journals that are associated with an association also have a complicated cost structure that is not integrated into the university finances. In at least some cases, associations benefit from royalty payments from publishers as well as editorial fees.
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I think the subscription model is going to die eventually. In science, the pressure in various forms is causing cracks in the system (NIH’s public access rules, the subsequent opening of many society journal’s backlists, PLoS). Many scientists honored Swartz by making their own publications available (a fairly low cost method of civil disobedience, since it’s unlikely that journals will go after their own authors, who are unpaid in order to defend their copyrights).
In science, I think the model will transform into an author pays/funding agency pays model with subsidies to publish some non-funded science (though I also think a cost will be the reduction of publication of non-funded science, which in the fields with I am familiar is non-existent, so I can’t really speak to that effect).
I don’t know what will happen in the humanities, but my suspicion is that the subscription model is unsustainable, though potentially it’ll survive by being low cost enough.
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Many scientists honored Swartz by using his death to publicize their own work. I thought that part was way tacky.
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“Many scientists honored Swartz by using his death to publicize their own work. I thought that part was way tacky.”
I disagree. If you believe in your work, and there’s someone out there who devoted a fair part of his life to making work like yours available to everyone, making it available to others in honor of that person is a legacy. Of course, people who think it’s tacky shouldn’t do it (and, everyone should respect the wishes of his family or any other documents he left behind).
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Time frames: this has already been an issue for about a decade, hasn’t it?
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Unfortunately, less and less research is actually publicly funded now. If you make all publicly funded research “free” – what will become of the rest of it? How will it be segregated?
JSTOR is not the problem; the broken system of academic publishing is. JSTOR adds value by archiving and making searchable the vast record of published research going back a century or more. (JSTOR may be available for free from you public library, by the way). What needs to happen is libraries – academic and public – need to work together to develop their own online distribution systems and make common-sensical agreements with all academic publishers for new research going forward. Leave the archives to JSTOR and Muse, etc.
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