Update on the Outrageous Costs of College Textbooks and a Useful Alternative

From the dp.la Women's Activism Exhibit

While none of this is shockingly new information, I was outraged afresh when a colleague emailed me this Huffington Post  article about the college textbook racket.  The article was written in response to an American Enterprise Institute post that showed college textbook prices rising faster than he Consumer Price Index, new home prices, and the average cost of medical care.  Cripes.

In happier news, last week saw the launch of an excellent open educational resource, the Digital Public Library of Amerca.  While the collection is still growing, some of the thoughtful features of the collection are already apparent: you can search material by era, geographical location, and theme.  I particularly like the Activism in the U.S. exhibit, which has already grown since I checked it out last week. 

Definitions: Archives and Institutional Repositories

Photo credit: Aureusbay

I’m wondering if anyone out there has any particular insights into the varying mission and functions of an archive versus an institutional repository. I thought I had a very clear idea in my head about what an institutional repository is, or at least its purpose. However, when I began to discuss this with my university’s archivist, her response was, “We already have an institutional repository—it’s called the archive!” This stumped me a bit. I don’t think they are the same thing, but it has been difficult to articulate the key differences.

After doing a little bit of research (Google was spectacularly unhelpful in this particular case) and some further discussions with our archivist, I have some coherent thoughts forming. I think archives and institutional repositories have related, but distinct purposes, which inform their policies and practices around content, preservation, and access.

Content

University archives collect a couple different kinds of content, including administrative records and materials relating to the history and accomplishments of the university and its members. While there may be legally required collections policies on administrative records, universities and their archivists generally have a fair amount of discretion when it comes to what to collect. Finally, in most institutions the archives were created in a pre-digital era, many of the objects in the archive were and continue to be physical. The shift to digital means a couple thing, one that archive catalogs are more likely to be online (just as with libraries), and two that archives must develop new policies for preserving objects that were “born digital”.

Institutional repositories collect the intellectual and scholarly output of a university. This may mean works published elsewhere, informally published works, grey literature, or work not formerly published. It is harder to make universal statements about what does or does not belong in an IR, because universities seem to use them different, however best fits their needs. I’ve seen examples of IR software that contain image collections and audio/visual collections. I would like to say that most of the materials in IR are “born digital”, but I’ve seen IRs that have digitized versions of old campus blueprints—something that seems more like an archival object to me.

Preservation or Access?

My crude, simplistic assessment of the major difference between archives and institutional repositories is that archives are more concerned with preservation and IRs are primarily about providing access. The two are clearly not mutually exclusive, in fact, one could ask what the point of preservation would be if not to provide future access, but that is just the librarian in me. However, when I look at the policies, practices, and opinions from these two communities, archivists and scholarly communication folks, this seems to be the key difference. 

The work of archivists is to ensure the long-term preservation of objects, often physical objects that are irreplaceable. They are concerned with original object, accession order, and provenance. While online archive catalogs have enabled more access points for searching and finding documents, archival cataloging is chiefly concerned with office of origin and date of creation. Compare this to library catalogs, even prior to the move online library catalogs still provided access points for author, title, and subject. 

In my mind institutional repositories are inextricably related to the open access movement. While they may serve the related purpose of preserving scholarship, their chief purpose is to provide access to that work. Scholars and librarians have advocated and created IRs in explicit opposition to disturbing trends in the scholarly publishing industry. 

What do you think? Are there other important differences between archives and institutional repositories? Or am I trying to create false distinctions between two things that are really the same?

Value and Values in Academic Publishing

This week, Alexander K. Brown, of Springer, published an op-ed in The Guardian pushing back against the open access movement by arguing that traditional academic publishers still add value. I want to respond to this, because in his piece he sets up a straw-man argument that misrepresents the arguments in the open access community as much as he claims that community has misrepresented the value of traditional publishing.

Brown paraphrases the whole of the open access argument thus: “the ill-conceived notion frequently advanced by commercial publishing's detractors is that all we do is polish a manuscript, put it online and then sit back and wait for the next sucker to submit an article.” Brown suggests that open access is about taking advantage of the cost savings associated with the move to online journal distribution.

He goes on to list the different ways that traditional publishers add value in the publication process. These include editing, recognizing emerging fields and creating new journals, managing editorial boards and peer review, developing new platforms, helping customers, facilitating access through description and metadata, among other things.

Brown lays out the time and labor that goes into journal publishing, and I don’t want to gloss over the fact that publishers do add value through their work and products. However, the premise of Brown’s argument is flawed. Open access proponents know and freely acknowledge that publishing online takes time and effort. So though open access arose partially in response to exorbitant journal prices, isn’t just about money.

Open access is about the values of academia and who controls the scholarly production of knowledge. Scholars do research in order to create new knowledge and benefit society through advances in science, technology, culture, and theory. Scholarly publishing has its roots in the Republic of Letters, where ideas were freely exchanged in order to further our understanding of the world, and those values are still central to the academy today. There is a fundamental and irreconcilable difference between the values of the scholarly community and those of the for-profit publishing industry. The crisis of journal pricing was merely a wake-up call about the degree to which we had let publishers take control over our scholarship. Open access is about the academic community taking back the ability to decide how we will share and build knowledge.

On Brown’s implicit argument that open access cannot financially sustain a comparable system of publishing, I say: we don’t have to. As Peter Suber discusses in his book Open Access, many of the costs of traditional publishing are eliminated when you are no longer selling subscriptions. The costs of marketing, branding, and customer service evaporate when you no longer have customers. 

Open Access to Open Educational Resources

While watching the webcast "Connecting the Dots between Open Access and Open Educational Resources," I noticed something interesting: the graph that represented the cost of college textbooks for students versus the rate of inflation looked almost identical to a graph that I saw 3 years ago at a presentation on the rising costs of periodical subscriptions.  Both graphs represent staggering rises in the cost to students and libraries for materials that rarely make the college professors and researchers who create them much money.

While libraries have been decrying the crisis in scholarly communication for years, and shrinking their book budgets to accommodate the bigger piece of the pie that periodicals are gobbling up, many students, according to webcast presenter and student Nicole Allen, seem to have adopted a different strategy: simply not buying their textbooks.

I don't think we should underestimate the undue burden that is placed on students by the onerous cost of textbooks (if you've never had a student at the reference desk in tears about how much she has to shell out for her biology textbook, consider yourself lucky).  Even if they've scraped together the loans to pay for tuition, it's sometimes that $200 economics textbook that means the difference between making rent and dropping a class.  The cost of materials should never be the deciding factor for a student's intellectual development, and the way that we, as librarians and scholars, can mitigate that potentiality is to pay a little more attention (or a lot more attention) to the Open Educational Resources (OER) movement that has been gaining traction in recent years.

The infrastructure for vetting instructional material is not as well developed for OER as it is for traditional textbooks, and this presents a barrier to widespread adoption of OER by instructors.  Most professors know the publishers that are well-respected in their field, they've seen the same names on articles and monographs since they were undergraduates, and using this information, they can make a quick choice of high quality course material from amongst traditional sources while they're in the midst of determining all of the other crucial elements of their course.  Getting newly acquainted with platforms for OER, looking through all new textbooks, and evaluating their quality is a lot to ask of busy instructors.

But vetting material is what librarians are all about, and I think that marriage of student need and instructor/librarian expertise is the making of a truly useful collaboration.  Just as we do for our normal collection, we can begin to look at the OER that are out there for our subject areas and create curated lists to present at our next faculty meeting.  Both webcasters suggested a great list of places to find OER, and two of my favorites are:

• Washington State's Open Course Library- a project that took the highest enrollment courses in the state and asked professors and librarians who worked with those classes to design free or very low cost materials--including syllabi, textbooks, and assessment--to be shared under a Creative Commons license (CC BY).
• Open Courseware Consortium- acts as a clearinghouse of OER material from the likes of Tufts, MIT, and the University of Michigan to be used by educators around the world (I like to look at the MIT literature courses just to see which authors are being taught these days).

A few libraries have begun to take active roles in promoting OER at their institutions--UMASS Amherst, for instance, has begun distributing grants to instructors to support their efforts to adopt OER in their courses--but according to webcast presenter Cable Green, most libraries have focused their intellectual and political energies on the Open Access movement and spent very little time looking at OER. 

The first step that I've decided on for myself is to head over to the campus bookstore to see just how much students are actually shelling out for course materials in my departments.  If it turns out that the cost is burdensome, I am going to take a look at some of those courses and see if I can match them up with some of the peer-reviewed OER that I find online.  Armed with that information, I think I could make a good case to the instructors in my liaison areas to consider alternative texts, and maybe save their students some serious money in the next few quarters.

Open Access across the Disciplines

I’m currently organizing a series of events at my university for Open Access Week (Oct 22-28), so my head is full of open access right now. It is my sense that there isn’t a very high level of awareness about open access or the many related issues in scholarly publishing at my institution, so I’m creating a workshop for faculty that will be, I hope, both informative and persuasive.

Luckily, fellow Bookaneer Althea, alerted me to a piece by Marisa Ramírez in the most recent issue of the Journal of Librarianship and Scholarly Communication. Ramírez relates a true story about a doctor who wanted to distribute to other doctors an emergency room checklist developed by researchers at another institution, but because the original authors had signed away their copyrights when publishing the checklist it took months and many emails and phone calls to receive permission to distribute it. The doctor, when he finally received permission, was glad, but wondered how many lives could’ve been saved if he had been able to distribute the checklist sooner.

It is a great and obviously compelling story about the real-life impact of “locked” content, and the potential value of open access. How can you argue with this? Open access saves lives! However, these stories always leave me feeling bad for the other disciplines. The impact of open access is not always (actually, rarely) about life and death. In most cases, the effects of access to scholarship are less immediate, but I believe still essential and life-changing (if not always life-saving).

The promise of open access is the same as the promise of education. Research and scholarship are transformative because they expose us to new ideas and change the way we think about the world. I still remember certain transformative readings when I was in college: reading Tocqueville and Rousseau changed the way I thought about citizenship and democracy; Amartya Sen haunted my study of Political Science; and two radical feminists bookended my undergraduate career, first an essay by Andrea Dworkin and finally a commencement address by Angela Davis. These are just a few scholars, critics, and theorists that have transformed or impacted the way I see the world, how I interact with it, and really, who I am today. Now I have no idea how I accessed these readers, through books or articles, in print or online. But, does it matter? The point is, access to scholarship is transformative. Knowledge shared and circulated is powerful. Knowledge kept under lock and key isn’t knowledge, it is a secret. This is what open access is about, it is about sharing ideas freely and the belief that more thought, more information, more knowledge make the world better.

I bring this up, because while open access is much more prevalent and less controversial in the sciences, there are still many misunderstandings and reservations in other disciplines. Earlier this week, the American Historical Association issued a statement acknowledging the inequities of the current scholarly publishing system, but also expressing concern over their perceptions of the open access model. Others have addressed the AHA’s statement (here, and here), but it points to a real need for open access advocates to address the value of OA in the social sciences and the humanities as well in the sciences.

As I write this I am very aware of the many elements of and obstacles to changing the systems of scholarly publishing. The AHA is concerned chiefly about the mechanics of open access publishing, and less about the potential value. I have further thoughts about the diffusion of publishing in the open access model, and the return of publishing to the purview of universities and scholarly societies, but these are for a different blog post. For now, I would like to reiterate that sharing scholarship freely and widely can have a profound and lasting impact on our society, be it in the sciences or other fields. I second Ramírez’s call:

As the 6th annual Open Access Week approaches, think about how you can tell your story so others understand “why OA?”.

I personally am thinking of stories in library science, in women’s studies, in history, in political science, and in the many fields where knowledge and scholarship have transformed my life.