Now we know first-hand: Editorial board of librarians resign over journal publisher’s restrictive licensing

The entire editorial board of the Journal of Library Administration, published by the Taylor & Francis Group, has resigned in protest over the publisher’s restrictive author licensing policies. Brian Mathews, who was preparing a special issue of JLA on library futures as guest editor, reported the mass resignation (including the text of the board’s statement) this last weekend on his The Ubiquitous Librarian blog. In the post, Mathews also linked to a post from Chris Bourg, one of the former board members, and from Jason Griffey, who earlier declined to participate in Mathews’s project due to pointed reservations regarding T&F’s author policies.

Editorial boards resigning in protest over publisher policies is not new (see the Open Access Directory’s “Journal declarations of independence” page [Update: I should have clarified that this page lists not only boards that resigned but who also took their journals [or replacements] into a less restrictive publishing environment, including open access.]). Indeed, just this last October, the editorial board of the journal Organization & Environment (SAGE) resigned over allegations of publisher intrusion on the journal’s academic freedom (see article in Inside High ED from October 29, 2012). What is interesting is how this issue has arrived at the door steps of libraries with new force and nuanced complexion. Once upon a time, it was sufficient that libraries played their primary role in providing access to information resources for “the many” who might not (OK, let’s just say they simply wouldn’t) be able to afford on their own. Publishers have never been happy with this, though occasionally they grant the marketing value of libraries—helping them sell books by enhancing public awareness.

Publishers have apparently been smarter with journals, pricing institutional subscriptions based on the assumption that one (print) copy received into the library would be accessed/read by “the many.” I’m not exactly sure how they pulled that off. Can you imagine a generalized institutional pricing system for book purchases? (Actually, I can. Kevin Smith reported here and here on the recent decision of the Supreme Court in Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons. Had the Court ruled in favor of the publisher, libraries could have faced precisely this kind of institutional pricing system. He says libraries “dodged a bullet” with this decision. But I digress.) Perhaps libraries thought, in our typically good-natured way, that it was reasonable for publishers to ask more based on this assumption. The problem with this calculus was run-away subscription pricing. Publishers reasoned they had captive customers in the libraries, and that “the many” would protest loudly if access was jeopardized. Problem was, while the demand was presumed to be inelastic, the budget also proved to be inelastic. We have been watching this story play-out for at least the last 30 years now.

Anyway, in the print world, no one, least of all libraries, really cared whether academic authors were getting exploited regarding their intellectual property rights. It wasn’t our business to care. Our singular mission was to provide access to published information resources for our constituencies, which we would do happily, assuming it could be done with some sense of economy. Print was the only game in town. Authors signing away their copyrights was simply the cost of doing business, and the price for getting published. Nobody, not even authors, really gave it a second thought (sadly, many still don’t).

This latest incident is a signal that something has changed in Libraryland, and librarians are awakening to it. It’s not only that we’ve been increasingly priced-out of providing access to many important and high-demand resources for our patrons. The BIG change, of course, is the whole paradigm shift in publishing from print to electronic, which includes the birth of a mode of “democratic publishing” available to anyone on the web. With this change has come the prospect of alternatives—alternatives to publishers, and (frankly) alternatives to libraries.

Something else has changed in this shift. Academic authors are starting to discover that they wield significant power in their research products. They don’t need to sell their souls for the right to be published. It’s no longer the publisher with a printing press that wields all the power, or makes all the rules. With alternatives abounding, the truth has been exposed that publishers desperately need author content in order to stay in business. Authors are starting to demand a more equitable relationship, or they’ll take their business elsewhere. (Presently, it would seem the only major lingering problems for academic authors are their out of touch colleagues, and antiquated policies of academic advancement that are still wedded to the old publisher-controlled system.)

Better late than never, astute libraries, too, are beginning to realize that it needs to be our business to care about authors, including advocating for them regarding intellectual property rights. The irony in this incident is that library researchers as academic authors are now being sensitized to the no longer acceptable practices of publishers in this regard. Creative libraries, too, are beginning to reach out to authors in the provision of direct publishing services, promising to by-pass traditional publishers altogether.

Brian Mathews, who was preparing his special issue of JLA as guest editor before all this blew-up, said he was asked why he didn’t just take the project to an open access journal. His answer was curious. “The reason I agreed to take on the guest editorship of this issue was specifically because it was in a traditional journal and distributed by a traditional publisher. I like the idea of taking disruptive content and baking it into a conventional platform. I’m a fan of OA but this was one instance where I was intentionally aiming for something with more confinement. You know, change from within, and all that” (emphases his). In an update, Mathews was even more adamant: “I get that librarians are passionate about OA and that OA definitely provides some high quality options—but I feel that a person should have the right to publish anywhere they want for whatever reason they want. … I guess you can say I’m pro-choice when it comes to publishing. I only care about the quality of the ideas expressed” (again, emphases his). I like a lot of Brian’s forward-thinking ideas on library topics. But while I can respect his opinion (I also applaud choice), and I sympathize with the fact that this news ruined his weekend, I think he is simply mistaken in this case. Libraries have given publishers too many passes. I’m siding with the editorial board on this one.

Of course this is only a first (and largely symbolic) step. Libraries admittedly cannot easily, quickly, or single-handedly extricate themselves from this ingrained system. We do still and must serve our constituencies first in the provision of needed information resources. But I think the point that this incident surfaced is that now we know first-hand how the current academic publishing system has been treating its authors, even as we have already long known (but felt powerless to avoid) what it has been asking us to pay to keep the system in place. With this new knowledge we can no longer go along as before. From now on we continue as knowing if not willing accomplices.

Croatian Open Access Declaration, the “Hamster” portal, and open access theology journals

I received an email last month from Matina Ćaran, theological librarian at the Biblijski institut/Bible Institute in Zagreb, Croatia about open access initiatives happening in her country. She told me about the Croatian Open Access Declaration that was officially released on October 24, 2012, and about Hrčak (“Hamster”) an open access scientific journals portal, which also hosts a number of journals in theology, including Kairos, a title published by the Bible Institute. I want to thank Ms. Ćaran for bringing these initiatives to my attention. I am also indebted to Dr. Ivana Hebrang Grgić, senior research associate with the Department of Information Science Faculty of Philosophy in Zagreb, whose book Open Access to Scientific Information in Croatia: Increasing Research Impact of a Scientifically Peripheral Country (2011, pre-publication version) added significantly to my understanding of the current state of open access in Croatia as I was researching for this piece. Thanks too, goes to Google Translate, which helped me immensely with the Croatian language.

Croatian Open Access Declaration

The Croatian Open Access Declaration was presented at a workshop hosted by the Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Zagreb, on October 24, 2012 during International Open Access Week. The workshop featured presentations by professors, librarians, computer information technologists, and a computer science student. The opening speech was given on behalf of the Croatian Ministry of Science, Education and Sports—the central funding body for basic research in Croatia—which has put open access to scientific literature on the national agenda. The first signatories of the Declaration were members of the organizing committee and presenters at the workshop.

To express our concern caused by lack of strategic points of reference on access, dissemination, storage and preservation of scientific information in Croatia, we are making the Croatian Open Access Declaration the purpose of which is to sensitise everyone who participates in creation, publishing, use, and preservation of scientific information in Croatia. In our declaration we are stressing the fundamental importance of scientific information, necessity of it being available to everyone, and obligation of its permanent preservation. Open Access means unrestricted, free, and undisturbed online access to digital scientific information that allows scientific information to be read, stored, distributed, searched, reached, indexed and/or used in any other legal way. Unrestricted in this context means free of any restrictions and terms imposed upon its access and use. For the purpose of having unrestricted access to the information, it is necessary to guarantee anonymity to the information users. … We are inviting the state administration, headed by the ministry responsible for science, as well as scientific and educational institutions, organisations, professional associations, and all the others involved in gathering and publishing scientific information to act decisively and in coordination in order to store all the Croatian scientific information in open access form. (from the Declaration)

As of February 2, 2013, 549 persons have added their names in support of the Croatian Open Access Declaration.

Hrčak (“Hamster”): Portal of Scientific journals of Croatia

In 2003, the Croatian Information and Documentation Society developed an idea for a central online portal for storing and accessing Croatian scientific and professional journals. The platform was developed and is maintained by the University Computing Centre, University of Zagreb, and it receives support from the Ministry of Science, Education and Sports of the Republic of Croatia as part of the government’s Science and Technology Policy [PDF]. The portal, which was launched to the public in February 2006, is called Hrčak, or “Hamster,” (apparently) named for that rodent’s remarkable ability to stuff its cheeks with food, which it then safely stores in its nest, to eat as needed at a later time. Not only is Hrčak intended as a portal for current access, it also serves as an archive for ongoing preservation, including journal titles no longer in publication. The Hrčak portal utilizes Open Journal Systems (OJS) publishing and peer-review management backend.

Thanks to Hrčak, publishers have a free, simple and fast tool for creating online versions of their journals, i.e. for small effort and no cost they can become OA publishers. Publishers are responsible for the regular uploading of full text articles and for inputting metadata at journal, issue and article level. Authors can see their articles’ download counters; their articles have better visibility and impact. Research and academic institutions get the chance for better dissemination of their research results. Readers (who can be scientists or the wider general public) can easily access the results of publicly funded research. Web robot software programs can disseminate information about the articles to the global scientific community. (Hebrang Grgić, pp. 48-49.)

According to Dr. Hebrang Grgić the majority of journal publishers in Croatia are not-for-profit, a status that makes them eligible for government support. According to the “Code of ethics for editors on the Hrčak portal” [PDF in Croatian], open access content is a pre-requisite for inclusion in Hrčak, with preference given to content that is immediately available (simultaneous with the release of a print or digital version). In special publishing circumstances, an embargo of up to 6 months is allowed, though issues will not be publicly displayed as published in the portal during this time. Finally, to enhance international visibility of Croatian research published through the portal, bibliographic information such as titles, abstracts, and keywords should be included in English and other languages. Conversely, inclusion of foreign-published Croatian research in Hrčak should include bibliographic information in Croatian. As of this writing, Hrčak has archived 323 journals, 7,013 issues, and 88,218 full-text articles.

UPDATE: I received further information about Hrčak from the portal’s development team at the University Computing Centre, University of Zagreb. The name “Hamster” is an acronym for HRvatski (Croatian) CAsopisi (journals). The portal was developed in-house and has been designed to be easy to use. “It does not support the whole publishing process like OJS, just the publication of ‘finished’ articles. Journal editors do all the manual work. They enter articles (each article as separate pdf) and respective metadata for their journal. We also have an OJS instance for interested journal editors, and have implemented a bridge between OJS and our back-end so there is no need to duplicate effort.”

Theological journals in Hrčak/Hamster

Calling this a portal for scientific journals is technically misleading from a disciplinary standpoint, because Hrčak also includes journals in the social sciences and the humanities. “Scientific” here is meant to encompass any systematic scholarly study of a topic or subject.

Of particular interest are 22 journal titles listed under Theology. A closer look shows 20 titles with content, including 3 titles that are apparently no longer published, but issues are included for archival access. About half the titles include coverage in theology as part of the inter- or multidisciplinary scope of the journal. Ms. Ćaran is not aware of any significant theological journal that is not included in Hrčak.

About a third of the journals are relatively new, having begun publication in the last 10 years. But several have been around for a long time, including Obnovljeni život/Renewed Life (ISSN 0351-3947), published by the Institute of Philosophy and Theology of Society of Jesus since 1919, and Bogoslovska smotra/Theological Review (ISSN 0352-3101), published by the Catholic Faculty of Theology, University of Zagreb since 1910 and is considered one of the oldest Croatian scientific journals. (I have created links to these titles in the Journal Directory.)

Kairos: Evangelical Journal of Theology

One of the relative new journals is Kairos: Evangelical Journal of Theology (ISSN: 1846-4580 (Croatian), 1846-4599 (English)), published by the Biblijski institut/Bible Institute, Zagreb beginning in 2007. (I have created a link to this title in the Journal Directory.) On the journal’s website, editor Stanko Jambrek lists four goals for the journal.

First, to be a canal for communicating the gospel and biblical values to intellectuals, pastors, preachers, students, believers and society. Second, to be a publishing support to Croatian evangelical theologians and scientists as well as lovers and doers of the Word of God. Third, to be a Croatian Evangelical voice to the world. Fourth, to publish articles of authors from around the world who are important to Evangelical Christianity in Croatia. The academic works of Croatian authors and authors from abroad who work in Croatia or who have been, in some way spiritually connected and influential in Croatia will be published in the articles and discussions section. Articles may be from biblical, systematic and applied theology, ethics, Church history, and sociology of religion, philosophy and church life. The journal publishes academic works that are characterized in accordance with the recommendation of the Ministry of Science, Education and Sport of the Republic of Croatia. Kairos publishes articles that are reviewed and those that are not subject to review. Articles that may be categorized as “academic” or “expert” need to have at least two positive reviews. Reviews are anonymous. The journal publishes articles without review that are of relative content for Evangelical Christianity, well thought out and well written.

I gathered Dr. Jambrek’s statement that the journal publishes academic works “in accordance with the recommendation of the Ministry of Science, Education and Sport of the Republic of Croatia” is referring to standards of academic quality, peer-review, etc. But also because the journal is open access.

As it happens, librarian Matina Ćaran is the journal’s secretary. I was able to ask her about Kairos as an open access journal.

We are proud to say that Kairos has always been open access, and will continue to be so. Kairos has so far been published by the Bible Institute, and as of this year it will continue to be published jointly with the Evangelical Theological Seminary in Osijek, Croatia. It is the first Evangelical theological journal in this region of Europe. Although it is a fairly new journal, over the last six years it has become a true Evangelical voice in these parts of the world, and we are reporting both strong and diverse readership. As a secretary of the Journal, I am happy about our growing exchange with other journals in the region, and presence in various open access databases and libraries.

Ms. Ćaran is also a signatory on the Croatian Open Access Declaration. I asked her about her philosophy of open access.

I am a librarian hoping for the time when I will no longer have say to my fellow students: “This is a article you need, but we cannot get it for you.” My personal philosophy of open access rests primarily on front-line work with students, and my personal experience throughout my previous and current studies: hitting walls of restricted access, having to become skilled in all kinds of ways to get to the requested information, article or book, and trying to work with what one has. However, even before I started working as a librarian at my school, I always believed that scientific information is something that is shared and given, not possessed and bought, and that everyone honestly seeking it for the sake of good should have an equal opportunity to access it.

Tribute to Aaron Swartz: Watch his “How we stopped SOPA” keynote at F2C2012

Open access to scholarly literature and research online depends upon an open Internet. It is easy to forget this is not a given. The Internet has become such an integral part of our daily lives as academics. We can hardly imagine now a world without it. We have sensed its potential and have been building an information infrastructure based on our experiences with its free beginnings. It is easy to take that freedom for granted.

It was one year ago today that Congressional leaders in the United States shelved two pieces of legislation, ostensibly geared toward curbing online piracy, but which could have had far-reaching and unintended consequences, threatening through censorship this concept of a free and open Internet.

It was a close call. The House bill, the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), and the Senate version, the PROTECT Intellectual Property Act (PIPA), were widely believed, both within Congress and among their supporters in the media industry (including many commercial academic publishers), to be destined for easy passage. However, a groundswell of organizational and, most significantly, citizen opposition forced the lawmakers to back down.

A significant voice in that citizen opposition to SOPA and PIPA was a fellow named Aaron Swartz. Aaron was a prodigious young computer programmer and an activist dedicated to the fight for free and open access to information and knowledge on the Internet.

If you’ve ever attached a Creative Commons license to a research article, book, blog (mine!), or media production, Aaron’s contribution was there. If you’ve ever subscribed to a blog or received webpage updates using RSS, Aaron’s contribution was there. If you’ve ever visited Internet Archive, Open Library, or Wikipedia (as an editor), Aaron’s contribution was there, too.

Tragically, Aaron was found dead in his apartment on the morning of January 11, 2013, apparently the result of suicide. He was 26 years old.

This is a terrible and sorrowful loss. But resisting the temptation to engage in speculation or offer analysis, I found the most fitting tribute to Aaron Swartz on this anniversary of the defeat of SOPA and PIPA was simply to take 23 minutes to watch the keynote address he gave at the F2C: Freedom to Connect conference held in Washington, DC on May 21-22, 2012. In the speech, Aaron tells a story about how it was ordinary people, not a big company like Google, that won this round in the fight “to save this crucial freedom.” Open access depends upon an open Internet. Let’s not take that freedom for granted.

Hat Tip: Open Access Explained!

One of the clearest, concise, and entertaining explanations of open access I have seen. Check-out this animated comic, Open Access Explained! narrated by open access advocates Nick Shockey, Director of Student Advocacy at SPARC (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) and Jonathan Eisen, Professor of Evolutionary Biology and Ecology at University of California, Davis on the PHD Comics website.

The piece focuses on open access to publically-funded scientific research. I wished for more of a nod to Humanities scholarship and the unique challenges of our disciplines relating to open access. But the explanation still translates very well. For example, this excerpt—I believe it is Jonathan Eisen speaking—could just as easily be applied to Humanities scholarship:

I think the main impediment [to open access] is the slow movement of scientific cultural practices. Scientists, despite being great explorers in terms of knowledge, are sort-of very conservative in changing their practices. Lots of the [scientific] community says: “O yeah, I support openness…but I want a Nature paper [that is, I only want to publish my research in a high-profile journal].” That reliance on impact-factor and the name of the journal [prestige] does allow some journals to not respond to the community pressure toward openness…

[We need to experiment with other models.] I view it much more as scientists and scientific publishers are slow to change. Some of them are going to be left in the dirt because openness is clearly the future. The creative ones are going to survive.

“Snippet view” in Google Books is not open access

Kevin Smith’s Scholarly Communications @ Duke blog is my go-to site for unpacking the meaning of recent court decisions relating to copyright and fair use and their implications for academic communities, especially libraries. His post on Judge Harold Baer, Jr.’s October 10, 2012 ruling in favor of HathiTrust in The Authors Guild v. HathiTrust copyright infringement lawsuit is an excellent and encouraging read.

Discussion on a listserv I frequent following the HathiTrust ruling included this comment from one participant:

I read this story last night and an argument can be made for either side, but it reminded me of one of my pet peeves in this area. I find this whole thing of putting whole books (minus pieces here and there) at Google Books or other places really problematic. I can readily understand journal articles being open-access but not books. I don’t know what the financial realities are for a big publisher like Macmillan, but the publishers whose books I mostly buy, and which publish projects that I have been involved in, like dictionary articles or book chapters, such as Zondervan, Baker, Eerdmans, InterVarsity Press, etc., are not, based upon what I’ve read, exactly rolling in money from huge revenues. Here’s one example. I can go to Google Books and find John Nolland’s New International Greek Testament Commentary on Matthew. There are bits omitted but there is enough there that if a student asks me where to find a good commentary on Matthew I can point the student to this work. He/she doesn’t need to buy it. A library doesn’t need to buy it. The student can read the lion’s share of the book without it costing him/her anything. This means that groups that put (mostly) full-text books on the web are essentially contributing to the potential bankruptcy of various publishers, and that would serve no one.

More than the HathiTrust case, the commenter may be thinking about the other lawsuit brought by The Authors Guild in 2005 (and still unresolved) against Google over the later’s alleged infringement through its massive book digitization project, which includes scanning of books still in copyright. In any event, the commenter contends that “putting whole books (minus pieces here and there) at Google Books or other places” is harmful to publishers because “there is enough [of the full text provided in the preview]” that a library or student doesn’t really need to buy the book.

The commenter is referring to “limited previews” of books still in copyright in Google Books. According to Goggle’s documentation (PDF), a “limited preview” can show “from 20 percent to 100 percent” of the full text content. However, it is the copyright holder (author or publisher) that grants permission to Google as to the the amount of text that is displayed. This is not something Google is doing of its own accord. The copyright holder may only grant permission for Google to display “snippets”— “two or three sentences surrounding the search term,” or it may not allow any preview at all.

In the example referred to by the commenter, John Nolland’s The Gospel of Matthew from The New International Greek Testament Commentary (Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2005), it is true that a significant percentage of the book’s 1,500 or so pages is included in the preview. However, the preview page also includes these words: “Pages displayed by permission of Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing.” In addition, there is a very prominently displayed red button with the words: “Buy Ebook – $68.” Responding to this commenter, Kevin Smith correctly assesses that publisher motivation in allowing this preview is calculated to actually encourage sales:

Publishers make such agreements because they believe that Google Books will drive traffic to purchase the book. The link to buy Nolland’s book is prominent on the page. So the publishers obviously do not believe, or do not universally believe, that allowing access of a substantial number of pages on Google Books will lead to their bankruptcy.

The basis for the commenter’s concern appears to be related to the fact that the Google Books limited preview is providing useful information—and in the case of John Nolland’s book, a significant amount of useful information—for free. “[T]here is enough there that if a student asks me where to find a good commentary on Matthew I can point the student to [Nolland's work on Google Books]. He/she doesn’t need to buy it.”

The commenter is overstating the case, though I confess that I have on more than one occasion gleaned useful information for research from a preview in Google Books instead of buying the book (or working with my library to secure a copy). But this, as we have discussed, is essentially beside the point. The purpose of the preview is to drive sales not provide access to content. It is a marketing decision, and the copyright holder can amend preview terms with Google at any time. The above documentation from Google makes this point explicitly:

Think of [Google Book Search] as a free worldwide sales and marketing program that includes your books in Google search results. Your participation in the program makes it possible for anyone searching for information on Google to discover and buy your books – even when they have no previous information to guide them. …

Prospective customers can browse sample pages as a preview, just as they can page through a book in a bookstore. If they like what they see, they can follow the purchasing links to buy the book – either directly from the publisher site or though popular online retailers.

A free preview is not open access

What I especially wanted to focus on is this statement the commenter made a few sentences earlier: “I can readily understand journal articles being open-access but not books” (emphasis added). I won’t here engage in the commenter’s suggestion that academic books should not be open access. I disagree, though I certainly understand there are many challenges. More important to me here is to push back against the notion that the availability of free content in any form (e.g., from Google Books) makes that content open access.

In attacking this notion I realize that I am attacking the keen and frugal sensibility of librarians in seeing the availability of free content from any credible source as a good thing. I also realize that I am running contrary to a proposal put forward by open access advocate John Willinsky in his book The Access Principle: The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship (MIT Press, 2006; available as an open access download here). In the book Willinsky identifies “ten flavors” of open access (he is focusing on academic journal articles). Among the “flavors” is what he calls partial open access, which is based on an economic model where “open access is provided to a small selection of articles in each issue—serving as a marketing tool—whereas access to the rest of the issue requires subscription” (Table A.1, p. 212).

This would appear to be exactly what we are seeing in Google Books: a limited preview—serving as a marketing tool—whereas access to the rest of the book requires that it be purchased. So why am I unwilling to recognize this as a viable form (flavor) of open access?

I do not know what Willinsky’s current view regarding “partial open access” might be. But I read the inclusion of it in his 2006 book as a concession to what he called “opening access” to knowledge—by which he means “increasing access and improving access to the journal literature, largely through the use of the Internet. It is about ways of making a greater part of this literature accessible to more people.” (p. 27, emphasis his). From this perspective, a free preview in Google Books or free access to an article or two on a toll journal’s website does technically increase access—at least as long as it is available. And this is really my overriding point. Because the preview or article is intended as a marketing tool to sell access to content, the commitment to openness is suspect. I would insist this “flavor” doesn’t really improve access because that access might be pulled tomorrow.

Speaking of flavors, the Google Books documentation puts it like this: “[Through the limited preview or snippet view] people get a taste of your book—but only a taste” (emphasis added). The list commenter felt Google Books, or rather, Wm. B. Eerdmans was giving away too much of John Nolland’s commentary. Though it isn’t actually the whole book, even the amount of content currently available in the preview might change if the publisher suddenly concurred with the commenter’s assessment. This is not open access because the access is limited and because the access is unreliable. I cannot imagine any library actually deciding it didn’t need to buy this book (in print or e-book format) because it felt it could just link to the free limited preview on Google Books.

As I write this post, and throughout the month of October, SAGE Publications is providing free access to all its online content. This is more than a taste for sure, and I know some scholars who might be apt to binge on this buffet! (I’m pretty sure, however, that “all” doesn’t mean the wholesale downloading of book essays or journal articles from SAGE’s site.) I do not dispute that this is a generous offer from a commercial publishing business model perspective. However, it is a limited offer specifically designed to sell reliable and continuing access to SAGE’s content. Come November 1 the buffet goes back behind the paywall.

I recognize the legitimacy of other “flavors,” or economic models designed to support open access as an intended goal (e.g, delayed access, subsidized, value-added formats, etc.). Open access is not about giving away too little or too much where behind that snippet, preview, or limited time “all you can eat” is an intention to sell information, useful or otherwise. Associating such activities with open access undermines the concept, which is committed to facilitating the free unimpeded, unlimited, and reliable flow of information for the cause of knowledge.

From my old school files, Part 2: Excerpts from that research paper on the development of the scholarly journal

I have a few very interesting stories brewing regarding a couple of theological journals that have converted from subscription-based to open access (the library will become the publisher for one, and the other is based at an institution that, along with its library, strongly supports and promotes open access), and a society journal which is not open access per se (although they provide a web archive of freely available back issues) but recently reversed a decision to go with a commercial publisher.

I hope to have my research for these stories completed before too long. I have to confess, however, that since the end of the school year (despite the fact that I work throughout the summer) I’ve been feeling pretty lazy about writing. I know. That’s not good. Bloggers need to keep a forward momentum going so their readers will stay engaged.

So, if only to let you know that I’m still alive, I’m following-up with the plan I suggested in a recent post to excerpt relevant bits from the semester paper I wrote for my Foundations of Library and Information Science course back in May 2004. The paper is entitled The Scholarly Journal: Long Tradition Behind the Coming Change. I uploaded the entire paper here (PDF 141KB).

As I mentioned in my previous post, the paper ended-up veering away from the topic of open access, though it deals with many of the issues that have been pertinent to the developing logic of open access in scholarly communication, including the currently unsustainable economic model, peer review, and intellectual property.

Budget Crunch at the Academic Library

It turns out that the issue of economic sustainability surfaced in a very real way at University of Arizona while I was researching for this paper. I led off in this way:

The news was right on the front page of Arizona Daily Wildcat (April 9, 2004): “Library cuts new books from budget.” The article reported that beginning October 2004, the University of Arizona library will implement an across the board cut of 16 percent over the next two years to book orders and journal subscriptions. The cuts were described as “a move to combat inflation [of about 9 to 10 percent per year] and a lack of additional funding.” Currently, UA library’s budget is about $9 million. Unless the cuts are implemented, librarians fear they will be facing a $1.3 million deficit by 2006. The planned cuts include 7,000 new books, 3,000 journals and $250,000 for electronic indexes. One faculty member who was interviewed for the article insisted the cuts “will be detrimental to the research and teaching mission of the university.” Students interviewed seemed to concur. “A library is a key component of the university. Cutting back is a huge mistake if you want to keep the university’s standards up.” Meanwhile, University President, Peter Likins was reported as appreciating the dilemma of trying to fully support valued assets such as the library in economically tough times. “In recent years, everybody gets cut. It’s more a question of who gets cut less. This university has treated libraries and library materials as very high priorities.”

I found it especially interesting and not a little ironic that commercial publishers, who first hit on the idea of selling journal subscriptions directly to institutions in the years following World War II, thus creating a guaranteed revenue stream from a “captive readership,” were initially resistant to the idea of getting into journal publishing because they didn’t see any profit in it!

After elaborating a bit more on the historical and economic circumstances that precipitated this most recent “serials crisis” (famously enshrined in the “Monograph and Serial Costs in ARL Libraries, 1986-2002″ graph on page 10 of ARL Statistics 2001-02 published by the Association of Research Libraries), I turned to the development of the scholarly journal as a conduit for research communication. The transition was captured in this excerpt and associated footnote, which anticipates key issues in the current conversation around open access—scholars taking ownership of their own intellectual property and having alternative avenues for scholarly communication (the notion that scholar-publishers could utilize the Internet to disseminate their research just like commercial publishers was really just starting to gain momentum in 2004, and print was still dominant), while continuing to assure quality of research through peer review:

There would be no journals to publish, or subscribe to, if there were no scholars and scientists conducting research, and desiring to report their findings to colleagues and contribute to the general store of human knowledge. Budget cuts also punish these primary producers of research. Every journal subscription that is cancelled potentially impacts communication and access between research producers and interested users. But the current journal system impacts communication and access in other ways, too. If there is a “captive readership” it would not be surprising to discover there are also captive researchers, and that commercial publishers are in the thick of it.

There are historical and practical reasons why the journal commands such a central place in the process of scholarly communication, and (ironically) why it became subject to commercial publisher exploitation. The present paper will look at some of these reasons as a preface to understanding the “serials crisis.”* Beyond this, the paper will very briefly introduce awareness of the rapid rise of electronic delivery that may be challenging the dominance of the print journal as the principal conduit of scholarly communication.
__________

* Publisher bashing is fun, and in some circumstances even justified. But I do not really want to belabor the “serials crisis” debate. As I quickly discovered, more than enough bandwidth has been dedicated to it. My introductory comments are (probably more than) sufficient. Rather, what surfaced for me as I began my research on the ways the crisis is being addressed, was coming to an understanding of the long tradition embodied in the journal as the principal and enduring artifact of scholarly communication, and insight into the process of peer-review that is typically conducted through the journal. If only for my own benefit, this is where I decided to put my energies.

“Scholarly” vs. “Scientific”

The paper focused on the particular relevance of journal literature in the sciences. But I was really interested in understanding the development and function of the journal in scholarly communication generally. I consciously chose to use the term “scholarly” instead of “scientific” because of my humanities orientation. I wrote about this in a footnote:

I am persisting in using the term “scholarly” in speaking about journals and communication, even though much of the literature I consulted was oriented toward the “scientific.” I will generalize from this direction, being aware that my own orientation is in the humanities. Naturally, Meadows (1974) grants that “scholarship” exists “outside the sciences.” However, for him the “essential difference is that scientists consider their knowledge to be ultimately objective.…[H]istorians can…write on topics that have been dealt with many times before; yet their work will be counted original—even if it uses exactly the same data—so long as they present their own interpretation. But two scientists who use the same data and work within the same theoretical framework should arrive at virtually identical results” (pp. 35-36). Similarly for Mary Jo Lynch (1984), “scientific research” is oriented toward discovering “new knowledge” with “data collected from nature” utilizing the scientific method. She defines “scholarly research” as “typically done by humanists [and] often based on [finding and analyzing] previous published work [i.e., existing knowledge] related to the matter at hand.” But she adds that in scholarly research, like scientific research, “data are collected and organized in an objective way and analyzed according to systematic principles.” The scholar’s research also “involves disciplined inquiry which enables the scholar to make an original contribution to the knowledge base of a field” (pp. 368-369).
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Lynch, M. (1984). Research and librarianship: An uneasy connection. Library Trends, 32, 367-383.

Meadows, A. J. (1974). Communication in science. London: Butterworths.

I highlighted why scientists came to prefer the article over the book, and (in a footnote) why humanists still prefer the book:

The scientific book also had long tradition of use, but its principle weaknesses were that it was too slow and too expensive, for both author and would-be readers. The format was also unwieldy for reporting on a single observation or experiment. Kronick (1976) makes the point that the “new philosophy” (à la Bacon) marks a “change in emphasis from constructing comprehensive world-views and all-embracing philosophical edifices, to an emphasis on collecting the results of observations and experiments.…The single observation or experiment has a unity in itself and the publications in which it results are likely to be short.…[T]he book…is not efficient for presenting the results of experiments or observations, because the author has to wait until he has accumulated a sufficient number of them to justify the publication of a book.” (p. 45)*
__________

Kronick, D. A. (1976). A history of scientific & technical periodicals: The origins and developments of the scientific and technical press, 1665-1790 (2nd ed.). Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press.
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* As an aside, but related to the larger topic, humanist scholars are more apt to continue, as it were, “constructing comprehensive world-views” in their research reporting. Consequently, they would be making ready use of the monograph to communicate their findings. Though I haven’t seen the breakdown, there is a good chance that the University of Arizona library’s decision to cut 7,000 books from its 2004-2006 budget will, on balance, hurt humanities scholars more than scientists.

Although the monograph continues to be the gold standard for judging humanities scholarship (Can you demonstrate an ability to construct “a comprehensive worldview” or an “all-embracing philosophical edifice”?), I believe the journal article or essay is increasingly gaining a respectable place. This may be due to a combination of factors, including economic (the expense of publishing a low volume specialized study in book form), social (the desire even among humanist scholars to speed communication to solicit feedback from colleagues; reduced time and capacity of colleagues to spend digesting voluminous works), and cultural (less confidence in comprehensive systems). And even where a comprehensive (or at least, expansive) treatment is desired, there may be greater openness (by tenure and promotion committees?) to have scholars dole it out piece-meal in more easily digested article-sized chunks.

The Purpose of the Scholarly Journal and Peer Review

My research introduced me to a fascinating study by Nancy Fjällbrant (1997) entitled Scholarly communication: Historical development and new possibilities. Fjällbrant argues that the scholarly journal became a “closed artifact” because it provided the best overall solution to the needs of scholarly communication.

Fjällbrant alludes to four important aspects of academic writing: ownership of an idea, societal recognition for the author, claiming priority for a discovery, and establishing an accredited community of authors and readers (Scholarly communication section, ¶ 1). She continues: “Authors are concerned with the ‘reach’ and diffusion of their ideas and findings. Their success and/or influence depends on the extent of the spread and recognition of their texts.”

I have already referred to informal communication among scholars (e.g., “invisible colleges”). But formal means of communication have traditionally taken print form. The advantages of formal communication are listed by Fjällbrant:

1. information can be spread to a widely scattered group of readers;

2. detailed information, such as descriptions of methods, tables, diagrams, results etc. can easily be given;

3. printed documents contain information which can be critically examined and verified;

4. the documents can easily be referred to as and when required;

5. published documents provide a means for establishing “priority” of academic work, and thereby contribute to establishing academic merit for the author(s). (Scholarly communication section, ¶ 4)

According to Fjällbrant, the printed scholarly journal was better able to deliver the majority of these advantages to the majority of the stakeholder groups than any of the alternatives. Consequently, it became dominant and forced “closure.” This has been true for roughly three hundred years. Fjällbrant goes on to wonder whether new forms of electronically published and network disseminated scholarly communication will force a reopening of this traditionally dominant artifact.

Regarding the early development of peer review:

Addressing advantages #3 (verifying the quality of research) and #5 (establishing priority of discovery) above led to a parallel development of refereeing, or peer review. It was the learned societies that first pushed scientists from secrecy into the public by providing mechanisms to guarantee priority of discovery, to register a permanent record of the discovery (society archives), and to give “an authoritative stamp” on their work through the judgment of peers (Fjällbrant, 1997, Needs of various groups section, ¶ 4-8). This model was carried over into print form via the scholarly journal. An early example can be seen in Rozier’s diligent editorial policies for the Observations. As was noted above, not only was Rozier prepared to reject articles that lacked requisite quality and originality (negative control), he also implied a belief that the community of scientists would conduct itself ethically and objectively “as friends of humanity” (positive control). These were the values and safeguards—what Stephen Cole (2000) alludes to as “the norm of universalism”—that lent credibility and sufficient confidence to this format.
__________

Cole, S. (2000). The role of journals in the growth of scientific knowledge. In B. Cronin & H. B. Atkins (Eds.), The web of knowledge: A festschrift in honor of Eugene Garfield [ASIS Monograph Series] (pp. 109-142). Medford, NJ: Information Today.

Re-opening the “Closure”: Print to Electronic…and Beyond

Fjällbrant could wonder in 1997 about the prospects for electronic dissemination of journals in electronic format. Most prescient, she identifies “a shift in emphasis from [library] collection building in anticipation of possible needs (JUST IN CASE) to information access on demand (JUST IN TIME) delivery” (Problems section, ¶ 2). I responded that this “is a challenge to the long-held perception of the library as a repository for human knowledge.”

The day is now here. Just the other day I was reviewing our periodicals renewals list for 2013. If I wasn’t canceling a title (due to cost, or lack of demonstrated use) I was making sure we were able to receive it in electronic format. Print is now reserved for the casual reading rack.

A change in delivery format driven by user expectation and demand is only the start. But I left it there. I gave the last word to Kate Thomes (2002), who did provide a passing reference to open access:

We are moving from a known mature system of scholarly communication in the print environment to an unknown digital environment in which established practices are no longer deemed relevant or necessary. The stakes are high in changing the system both economically, for publisher profits and costs to higher education, and socially, for the potential benefits of open access to the scholarly record.…It took the ingenuity and intelligence of our predecessors to create the past system and it will require nothing less from us to create a new system of scholarly communication that fulfills its mission in the digital age. (p. 109)
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Thomes, K. (2002). Scholarly communication in flux: Entrenchment and opportunity. Science and Technology Libraries, 22(3/4), pp. 101-111.

From my old school files: “Scholarly communication, electronic content and ‘open access’”

I graduated from the School of Information Resources and Library Science (SIRLS), University of Arizona, Tucson, in December 2004 to facilitate a mid-career shift from church/pastoral ministry back into the academic world as a librarian.

The decision to enter academic librarianship at this moment in time has proven to be among the best I have ever made. I have been able to witness and (more importantly) directly participate in dramatic changes impacting the nature and role of the library in the digital age. It has been personally very exciting and extremely energizing.

Witnessing and participating in the rapidly changing scholarly communication landscape has been one aspect of academic librarianship of particular interest to me. I latched onto this early in my career preparation. Clearly, I was bringing the scholarly disposition with me into this shift. But there were new things I was to learn about this communication process of which I was previously unaware, including the assumptions of the existing system, and the disruptive forces—like the Internet as a platform for dissemination, and the fledgling Open Access Movement—that would help to drive that change.

I was rooting-around in my old school files the other day and found a research proposal I had submitted to Professor William Welburn for the semester paper assignment in IRLS 504: Foundations of Library and Information Science, dated March 4, 2004. The proposal is entitled “Scholarly communication, electronic content and ‘open access.’” For archival purposes, as well as a reminder to myself of how I started down this path of interest in open access, I thought I would transcribe the proposal here. (Incidentally, the actual paper, which I also have in my file, ended up focusing primarily on the historical development of the scholarly journal. Although I did not proceed to address open access, there are some interesting bits in the paper that bear on the larger process of scholarly communication and the logic of open access. I may share some of this in a subsequent post.)

Topic: Scholarly communication, electronic content and “open access”

Peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly journals, published in print form at regular intervals, have provided a workable medium for broad and relatively rapid dissemination of the results of research since the late seventeenth century. Because the peer-review system quickly became entrenched as an institution of formal scholarly communication, scholars and researchers have viewed participation in the system as an expectation for making their contributions to human knowledge and gaining appropriate recognition.

A large commercial journal publishing industry has grown-up in the midst of the “quasi-exponential” expansion of scientific and scholarly research over the years (Meadows, 105). As long as publishing was seen as an efficient and cost-effective medium facilitating relatively unimpeded access for scholarly communication no one complained too much about the “business side” of things. However, a complex series of issues in recent years has exposed a looming crisis. The scholarly community is a captive market in an entrenched peer-review system, and therefore subject to potential exploitation by publishers. While most scholars are not motivated by profit in their research (although they do want to receive appropriate recognition for their work), commercial publishers clearly are. The industry has become increasingly concentrated through merger and acquisition, and the elimination of true competition has driven-up the costs of journals dramatically. Libraries, which have traditionally served as a key access point for scholarly journals, are increasingly under pressure to cancel subscriptions as a cost-cutting measure. Meanwhile, intellectual property issues under publisher copyrights can often restrict scholars’ use of their own publications!

Recent years have also seen the rapid development of online “full text” electronic versions of print journals. The new technology has promised enhanced access, reduced time lag between completion of research articles and publication, and potentially reduced costs over print (also saving libraries considerable shelf-space). But publishers have acted quickly to consolidate control over the electronic journal market through elaborate subscription agreements that “bundle” high-quality high-demand journals with lower-quality lower-demand journals, furthering their profits. In a recent article, Christopher Reed (2004) writes:

Now, with electronic access and bundled price deals from publishers, the storehouse of knowledge has been further centralized and relocated to the computers of commercial publishing houses and professional societies. Like it or not, publishers have become the de facto libraries of the world. They know it and are exploiting it for unseemly financial gain.

Scholars and researchers and their supporting institutions are beginning to ask whether the new online electronic technologies might be utilized to by-pass the costly, restrictive and exploitative practices of the commercial journal publishing industry. It is appreciated that just publishing articles to the Web is not sufficient. The best aspects of peer-review are still needed to assure quality research. But scholars, researchers and their supporting institutions are beginning to ask whether this can be done outside the current structure—regaining a measure of control, and enhancing true access and dissemination of research results. Momentum for change is gaining under the rubric of “Open Access” (e.g., the Budapest Open Access Initiative). This paper will review the history of the peer-reviewed journal, and the growth of commercial publishers leading to the current crisis. Emphasis will be placed on understanding how “Open Access” can work as a viable alternative to the current publisher controlled system.

Underlying theme: This topic interacts with a variety of interrelated issues: the economics of publishing, costs to subscribers, access, and intellectual property. While it will be unavoidable that I touch on most of these, I would like to structure this paper around the underlying theme of access. While not being naive or merely idealistic, profit-motive restriction on access seems antithetical to the spirit that impels most scholars and researchers to want to add to the store of human knowledge.

References

Cole, S. (2000). The role of journals in the growth of scientific knowledge. In B. Cronin & H.B. Atkins (Eds.), The web of knowledge: A festschrift in honor of Eugene Garfield [ASIS Monograph Series] (pp. 109-142). Medford, NJ: Information Today.

Fjallbrant, N. (1997). Scholarly communication: Historical development and new possibilities. Paper presented at the 1997 IATUL Conference. http://www.iatul.org/doclibrary/public/Conf_Proceedings/1997/Fjallbrant.doc [updated link].

Meadows, J. (2000). The growth of journal literature: A historical perspective. In B. Cronin & H.B. Atkins (Eds.), The web of knowledge: A festschrift in honor of Eugene Garfield [ASIS Monograph Series] (pp. 87-107). Medford, NJ: Information Today.

Reed, C.A. (2004, February 20). Just say no to exploitative publishers of science. The Chronicle of Higher Education, p. B16.

A few Religious Studies articles showing up in SAGE Open open access “mega journal”; reviewers being solicited

The other day I received an email from a librarian colleague who is also a scholar in New Testament. He considers himself an “under-employed Ph.D.,” by which I gather means having the academic credentials but not a full teaching position. I don’t know the circumstances of his situation, but I do know he is not alone. Professorships in Biblical Studies are notoriously difficult to come by.

His email was interesting on a number of levels. He was asking, as someone who is trying to establish himself “as a competent scholar,” why he should consider open access instead of trying to get his articles accepted in “well-known and prestigious journal[s].” He was also curious about copyright issues with open access.

These are important questions that I want to follow-up with in a subsequent post. In this post, however, I want to write about the specific situation that prompted his questions. A couple of weeks ago he received an unsolicited invitation from SAGE Publications to be a reviewer for their new open access journal, SAGE Open. He had never heard of SAGE Open. He wanted to know what this was all about.

What is SAGE Open?

The model for SAGE Open appears to be PLoS ONE, a multidisciplinary open access science “mega journal” (particularly for the life-sciences and medicine) published by Public Library of Science, the now renowned non-profit open access science journal publisher.

SAGE has had a program in place for some time which enables authors to pay a fee to make their articles open access, particularly to comply with mandated archiving policies by funding agencies. But this is SAGE’s first foray into open access journal publishing. SAGE Open (started in 2011) is seeking to do and be for the humanities and social/behavioral sciences what PLoS ONE is and does for the sciences.

The “mega journal” approach differs from “traditional” discipline-specific journals (even in electronic format) in a number of significant ways. First, as already noted, it is intentionally and broadly multidisciplinary (browse SAGE Open’s subject coverage here, which to my initial surprise includes Religion and Religious Studies). SAGE, again following PLoS, is promoting this as a strength of the journal: “[B]y not restricting papers to a narrow discipline, SAGE Open facilitates the discovery of the connections between papers, whether within or between disciplines” (from the SAGE Open “About the journal” page).

Second, unlike what most scholars are used to, the SAGE Open mega journal is not organized as a limited collection of articles (typically with other editorial or review content) gathered into issues and then released at some specified (periodic) time interval (quarterly, bi-annually, etc). In SAGE Open, research articles are published continuously as they are submitted, peer-reviewed, and accepted for publication. The journal leverages the inherent strengths of online dissemination on their web platform (the journal is online only), which is not hampered by the practical limitations of space or distribution imposed by the print journal archetype. SAGE Open has an ISSN (2158-2440), but the published article is really the major currency of the title. Because articles are published continuously, this speeds up the overall publication process. The timeframe from submission to acceptance to publication can now be measured in weeks instead of months (or even years).

Finally, SAGE differs from PLoS in being a for-profit commercial publisher, but is similar to PLoS (and Springer, another major for-profit open access publisher) in covering the costs of making SAGE Open open access by charging article processing fees in lieu of subscription or pay-for-view fees to would-be readers. PLoS ONE currently charges a $1,350 fee for each article accepted for publication. SAGE Open charges $695 per article, but currently has a “special introductory rate of $395.” The article fee pays for peer-review, copyediting and typesetting, archiving, “global distribution” on SAGE’s online journal platform, and branding/marketing by “a world-leading social science publisher.” Authors retain their copyrights under the terms of a Creative Commons Attribution Licence (CC-BY 3.0).

A few Religious Studies articles showing up in SAGE Open

I had visited the SAGE Open site for a cursory glance a while back. But after my colleague’s inquiry I was prompted to take a closer look. I know that SAGE publishes a number of journals in Theology and Biblical Studies. But why would a New Testament Biblical Studies scholar be invited to review for a broad multidisciplinary humanities and social science journal? When I browsed the subjects I was surprised to discover an entry for Religious Studies, and a link to three articles. Not a lot. But it’s a start.

Editorial structure, peer-review and journal development

I contacted the Biblical Studies and Theology Publisher at SAGE to inquire about the relationship between SAGE’s traditional journal offerings and Religious Studies coverage in SAGE Open. She is not currently directly involved in this open access effort. However, she was kind enough to explain how SAGE Open intends to function editorially to include subject coverage in Religion.

The SAGE Open managing editor (working with a team out of SAGE’s office in the United States) recruits an external academic editor for every article submitted, in consultation with subject editors within SAGE. The article editor will be a reputable academic, working in a field related to the subject of the article. The article editor is then responsible for the peer review process, and will recruit two academic reviewers for each article. This ensures that the decision-making process for articles is independent of SAGE and conducted by academic experts. There is an academic board in place, whose capacity is advisory. Their names are listed here. The pool of article editors and peer reviewers is much wider, representing a diversity of subject areas. That pool is growing all the time, in parallel with submissions. The aim is to provide a forum for sound research, and naturally we hope that the individual subject categories within SAGE Open will grow and become a place that people interested in specific disciplines will recognize for quality.

The peer review process is designed to evaluate the scientific and research methods of each article for validity; the article editor accepts articles solely on the basis of the research and not on the basis of thematic significance. In other words, if the scholarship behind the research is sound, the article is accepted. This approach allows readers greater access and gives them the power to determine the significance of each article through SAGE Open’s interactive comments feature and article-level usage metrics.

I asked her if SAGE has plans to develop any dedicated open access journals in Biblical Studies, Theology or Religion. Her response was understandably vague and noncommittal.

In terms of future direction, I’m not in a position to define SAGE’s strategy here, other than to say that we see SAGE Open as an important part of our portfolio, alongside our other journals, books and digital products. SAGE monitors market developments closely and, like any successful business, we aim to move with the times and adapt our approaches accordingly. We remain open to exploring different models and channels of publication, where such developments are strategically sustainable and contribute to the quality and depth of our portfolio. If you have thoughts on possible future ventures for SAGE then I would love to hear about them!

Her reply suggests that SAGE Open is serving as SAGE’s demonstration that it is on-board with open access. Her response also answered my question about my colleague’s invitation. Subject editors and reviewers, once secured, are paired with authors as their articles are submitted. So, if my colleague accepts the invitation, he will be placed in a large multidisciplinary pool of academic experts on-call to review articles matching their subject expertise. Again, different from traditional discipline-based journals that intentionally seek articles from within a relatively narrow scope, with SAGE Open, the articles that are submitted and are subsequently accepted for publication drive subject area development from within the journal’s broad scope.

Because of this, there is really no reason why a scholar in New Testament couldn’t submit an article for inclusion in SAGE Open. When this happens, a subject editor would be chosen to shepherd this article through the submission process. My colleague might be called upon to review this article based on his subject expertise. Then, if the article is accepted for publication, the subject coverage within SAGE Open simply expands (or the granularity is refined) to accommodate. Fascinating.

This model has been very successful for PLoS in the life sciences (where I understand hundreds of articles are submitted each week). I can see SAGE making a go of this for the social/behavioral sciences. It is harder to say how this model will function in the humanities, where discipline focused publishing is a hallmark of scholarship. The journal is still very young. To get things going, SAGE is selling authors its publishing expertise, a seat on its well-developed and interactive online platform, and its brand reputation. Readers discover articles through search engines and indexes, or they can subscribe to email alerts or RSS feeds from SAGE Open’s site.

Why did you decide to publish your article in SAGE Open?: A response from one author

I was curious how the authors of the three Religious Studies articles currently available in SAGE Open first learned about the journal, and why they decided to submit their article to SAGE Open. So I emailed them. I received one response.

This author heard about the journal through a bulk email sent from a subject editor at SAGE. This author provided an extensive explanation for deciding to publish in SAGE Open, but it came down to the peer-review and article selection process.

When I received the invitation to submit to SAGE Open I initially ignored it; I get such automatic invitations from pay (or “page charge”) journals all the time. However, when I got a repeat email on March 12, 2011, I decided to look closer into their mission, and I read the following sentence, “As such, it evaluates the scientific and research methods of each article for validity and accepts articles solely on the basis of the research.” In plain words, the promise was if the research was sound it would be accepted, regardless of whether it fit the mold of [conventional or preconceived] solution strategies. Ergo, I submitted the manuscript.

Speaking of “pay (or ‘page charge’) journals,” I asked: “Did you pay the article-processing fee yourself, or did you have a sponsor (supporting agency, academic department, etc.)? Did you think the fee was a fair amount? Do you think the article-processing fee approach is a sustainable business model for open access?” The author responded:

I paid it myself. There was an introductory, discounted price of $195 fee (the regular price was $695). I believe the former is reasonable to be paid by the author. The latter would probably require assistance from a sponsor.

The author felt, however, that page charges “seem to be antithetical to the purpose of open access.”

I then asked if the author would share article-level metrics. “Is your article being discovered and read?”

According to Publish or Perish (which parses Google Scholar), it has not yet been cited. A Google search shows it has been discussed on one listserv and has been mentioned on two blogs. There was one inaccurate, off-the-wall comment on SAGE Open’s site, which allows readers to post comments after the journal. It is probably just too soon to tell if the article is being discovered and read.

Finally, despite reservations about article processing fees, the author was positive about recommending SAGE Open to other scholars, including scholars in Religious Studies disciplines.

I don’t know whether this author’s recommendation will inspire the confidence of my librarian/New Testament scholar colleague to review articles or submit his own for publication in SAGE Open. But at least we now both have a better understanding of what the “mega journal” concept is all about.

The library as open access publisher: Meet Igitur publishing

I first encountered Igitur publishing while profiling the new religious studies open access journal Religion and Gender back in December. Igitur publishing is a service of the Library at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. I’ve been meaning to follow-up with Igitur, not only because I wanted to learn more about open access from the publisher side, but also because the idea of “library as publisher” has been really gaining traction in recent years (see, for example, this report just released in mid-March). I am very pleased for this opportunity to sit down (via email) with publishing consultant, Dr. Inge Werner.

Omega Alpha (OA): Dr. Werner, thank you so much for your willingness to speak with me a bit about Igitur publishing. We have been trying to arrange this conversation for a couple of months. I know you have been very busy preparing a launch of three new open access journals (more on this below). Can you tell me what “Igitur” means? It’s Latin, right? How is the name significant to your publishing efforts?

Werner: ”Igitur” means ‘thus,’ or ‘therefore’ in Latin. The word stems from a Medieval student song called “Gaudeamus Igitur.” [OA: I found a reference to it in Wikipedia, complete with lyrics.] The name was chosen long before I came to work in the University Library, so I’m not quite sure what the reference implies. I like to think of it in terms of the self-evidence with which the Library aims to facilitate the university faculties and their communities of academics. At this point, “Igitur” has become synonymous with the Open Access activities of Utrecht University Library.

OA: How long have you been at it?

Werner: Do you mean me personally, or the Library as publisher?

OA: Both.

Werner: I started working in the Library after receiving a PhD in Renaissance Studies in 2009. I had been wanting to work in publishing for a long time. I was lucky to be able to start as journal coordinator for the Library’s open access journals. In the meantime my position has evolved to being team leader and publishing consultant in the team that works on the open access e-journals.

The Library has been at it since 1997, when the first Utrecht ejournal was started, the Electronic Journal of Comparative Law (EJCL).

OA: 1997 was still in the relative early days of the public Internet. The Open Access movement, as such, hadn’t even formally begun. I found this excerpt by the Editor, Sjef van Erp, from the very first issue of EJCL, which nicely captures many of the benefits of open access as we would enumerate them today:

One of the advantages – perhaps the main advantage – is that [electronic publishing] uses a new medium (the Internet) for the dissemination of ideas, which makes it possible to reach a readership to a degree which could hardly be imagined only ten years ago. Anyone connected to the Internet can read what is published there. Another advantage is that publication can be done at low cost by e.g. university computer services. It thus leads to a new type of ‘university presses’, and takes the publication of academic writings back to the place where the ideas emanate from. What academic authors most of all want is to be read by their peers, students and others interested in the results of their intellectual endeavours. Being read is, at the end of the day, the ‘profit’ they make and desire. (emphasis added)

Werner:  What I like about the concept of the University, or University Library as publisher is the fact that scholars or societies retain the intellectual ownership of their endeavours and their journal. A traditional publisher would want a journal to fit into a portfolio, while scholars often have a very strong and keen eye for a particular niche in their field, a topic that they would want to see addressed in a journal. This, for instance, is how Religion and Gender started. Dr. Adriaan van Klinken and Prof. Anne-Marie Korte came to talk with us and chose to publish with a library partly because it would give them the opportunity to form the journal according to their own needs.

OA: How are Igitur’s publishing efforts funded?

Werner: Initially, our publishing operation was funded entirely from budgets for innovation from within the Library. At this point, editorial boards and/or their societies pay for starting up and pay yearly amounts for support (and for extra services such as typesetting and print). However, a large part of what we do is still funded from within the Library for ideological reasons—to support OA publishing and stimulate transitions to OA.

OA: So it’s part institutional subsidy and part library budget. It speaks highly of your library’s commitment to open access that you would fund some of the publishing costs from your own budget.

I would be interested to know more about how the Utrecht University Library came upon the idea of promoting open access to the degree that you became a publisher. What was the catalyst? Have European academic libraries experienced the same “journals crisis” that U.S. libraries have regarding increasingly expensive subscriptions?

Werner: Most research and university libraries have been involved in OA since day one. Here in Europe as well as in the U.S. the journal crisis has led to a search for new ways to make scientific output available online.

Utrecht University Library has been developing open access services since 2000 in an innovative unit called Igitur, Publishing & Archiving Services. Two well-functioning open access services have now emerged from this unit. The first is the institutional repository for Utrecht academics called Igitur Archive (the ‘green road’ in OA-speak), and the second the journal publishing service (‘gold road’) called Igitur publishing, the service I am working for.

OA: I believe that if more scholars in religion and theology are going to contribute to and even start new open access journals, they will need encouragement and support from the libraries at their institutions. What advice would you give to libraries that might want to get involved in open access?

Werner: The task of a university library is to support scientific communication, to distribute scientific information, to stimulate knowledge exchange by providing access and, finally, to support archiving and permanent preservation and findability of academic output. This is precisely what we do when we help scholars publish their research. The library’s expertise in online distribution of knowledge (findability and visability) is only one example. Through our archive and persistent identifiers for every published article we make sure the journal content is preserved in a sustainable way.

Speaking from the perspective of (journal) publishing as a relatively new task for libraries, I can only account for the fact that libraries are traditionally strong in services that are very useful in publishing. Typical publisher’s services such as editing and typesetting can easily be outsourced, and as regards peer review, many editorial board are already used to organizing peer review themselves. The actual reviewing is always done by scholars themselves, as a free gift to the academic community and to the publisher who in the traditional model makes good money out of their work.

OA: Can you tell me a little more about the services Igitur provides to scholars who might want to start an OA journal?

Werner: My team is a small team dedicated to the publication of these journals. We support scientific editorial boards of peer reviewed journals who want to publish their journal in Open Access. We offer software to set up and run a journal (Open Journal Systems) and help people to get started and going. My publishing team consists of four people: a marketing consultant, a journal coordinator, a publishing assistant and myself—publishing consultant. We are supported by some highly qualified developers and the Library’s ICT [Information Technology] maintenance section. Also, our subject librarians are involved in working on the findability and visibility of the journals. Due to their very specific skills in online information management, they are able to optimize the way in which journals are indexed and work on search engine optimalization.

Thus (igitur, if you will), over 20 journals have taken the step to Open Access under the auspices of the Library. Some entirely new, such as Religion and Gender, some subscription-based, paper journals who start publishing an Open Access version on the side, or convert to e-only.

In the last months, for instance, we have been working for three old and renowned Dutch society journals in Humanities who are transitioning to Open Access. All three of them have received funding from the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). Recently, NWO has supported the start or transition of several journals in Humanities through an Incentive Fund Open Access.

On Friday, March 30, all three of them have published their first issue in Open Access. You can find their websites here:

• De Zeventiende Eeuw. Cultuur in de Nederlanden in interdisciplinair perspectief
• BMGN: Low Countries Historical Review
• Studium

OA: It is very exciting to see traditional subscription-based journals convert to open access. This appears to include the digitization of back issues on at least two of the journals. Is the plan to include a full-run archive for each of these titles?

Werner:  Yes, together with the societies publishing these three, we are working on the digitization and importing of their archives. The back-issues for BMGN: Low Countries Historical Review have already been imported in the journal’s Archive. Issues have been digitized from 1970 onwards and have been made freely available in full-text via the website at the moment of launch. Studium has several predecessors, uploading these three will be completed in the course of this year. Back-issues for De Zeventiende Eeuw are already online via the DBNL (the Digital Library of Dutch Literature) and will be transferred to the journal website in the course of 2012.

OA: Have you now developed a process that has proven to be effective for open access journal publishing? Would it be fairly easy for other institutions to replicate what you have done? Indeed, have you assisted other institutional/library publisher start-ups?

Werner: Every now and then we talk to other libraries, both in Holland and from abroad who have plans of starting a journal publishing service. In the Netherlands, for instance, the Library of the Free University in Amsterdam has launched several journals last year, and the Technical University of Delft is working on some this year.

OA: Do you have any final thoughts, or can you touch on pertinent issues I failed to mention?

Werner: At this point, when traditional publishers start to convert to open access models and hybrid models, you have Open Access and Open Access. The original OA is about stimulating worldwide knowledge exchange through free availability online. Copyright with the author and licenses (e.g., Creative Commons) that stimulate reuse are also an important part of that. OA, therefore, is not only about accessibiblity but also about licensing. Also, I have concerns about for-profit open access publishing. The financial side of OA is complicated as we are now in a process of transition. Commercial publishing is inevitable, also in an OA world. However, we do need to find a way to keep article processing charges (APCs) within normal proportions. The current situation, where some traditional publishers increase their profits every year while universities are coping with shrinking budgets and cutbacks is untenable.

OA: Before I let you go, can you speak briefly about the e-book side of Igitur publishing? I just downloaded Pieta van Beek’s The first female university student: Anna Maria van Schurman (1636). I’m finding it a very interesting read!

Werner: Pieta van Beek’s book is actually the last e-book we published in the Library. After that, we stopped publishing e-books and decided to focus on journal publishing. We do, however, notice that there remains a big demand in the Faculties for publishing books and booklets online, like conference proceedings, or Utrecht-based output, such as a collection of interviews with Utrecht professors. Hence, we are looking into possibilities of supporting online publishing via a printing on demand button in the Igitur Archive.

OA: Dr. Werner, thank you so much for your time. I will continue to watch developments at Igitur publishing with great interest.

Open access as a public good: “He who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.”

This “hat tip” goes to the Spring 2012 issue of JISC Inform for covering the January 17, 2012 JISC/SCONUL Lecture in London presented by Professor Robert Darnton, Director of the Harvard University Library. Professor Darnton’s lecture was entitled, “The Digital Public Library of America: Current Plans and Future Prospects.”

Darnton spoke on the Digital Public Library of America, an ambitious project that will seek to create a national digital library, bringing together the world’s cultural and scientific record and making it freely accessible to all. In the lecture, Darnton speaks passionately about open access, and coming to view knowledge as a public good.

To set the stage, Darnton references a well-known letter that Thomas Jefferson wrote to an Isaac McPherson on August 13, 1813. “Jefferson developed a metaphor,” says Darnton, “which is a description of the way intellectual communication takes place—it’s a process of spreading light from one taper, or candle, to another.” He quotes the following excerpt:

If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.

“Well,” continues Darnton, “Jefferson wasn’t exactly thinking of the Internet. But I think that is the message, and I would add to it open access—free access for humanity to the collective good of humanity.”

A bit later, Darnton again comes back to Jefferson’s metaphor to speak about how the Internet facilitates information access—exactly what I thought of as I was listening to him reading Jefferson’s words. “To get back to the idea of Jefferson’s candle-light power, enlightenment, it may seem archaic today of course, but I believe it can acquire a twenty-first century luster if you associate it with the Internet. The Internet which multiplies messages at virtually no cost.”

I have embedded Darnton’s lecture (just over an hour in length) here. It is well worth a viewing.