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. 

Build a Better E-Book: A Wish List for Academic Reading

The following post developed out of many frustrated and fruitless attempts to use e-books for academic research and educational purposes, and more recently from conversations between Bookaneers Freeda and Althea. This is specifically about using e-books for academic and educational purposes, and specifically not about reading for leisure. 

Anyone who has tried to do research in e-books has probably experienced many of the same frustrations we have. The interfaces are clunky and confusing, it is difficult to browse or "berrypick" within the books, you are most likely reading on your computer, and the list goes on. This is exactly the opposite of the experience reading a paper book. Paper books are simple, intuitive, and pleasurable to read, and they all operate in exactly the same manner. 

What we want is optimum functionality: for e-books to take the best aspects of paper books and the many possibilities of digital. We want uniformity across platforms that includes the ability to customize your reading experience. And we would like it happen in substantially less than the several hundred years it took for print publishers to standardize practices after the invention of the printing press. 

Below is our list of "demands": what we would like from academic e-book publishers. We would also love for this to be an ongoing conversation. Librarians, researchers, students, by all means, let us know what your experiences using e-books for research and education have been. Which functions work, which do not? What are your demands?

Hyperlinks

One of the major differences between reading for pleasure and reading for learning is that academic reading tends to be less linear. It is much more common to jump around, refer back to previous passages, and of course to use all of the additional information and material included in the book. E-book platforms and devices for academic reading should hyperlink footnotes, endnotes, citations, tables of content, and indexes. Most importantly this includes being able to jump from the text to the endnote and back again. Ideally, it would also be much easier to bookmark a section and quickly jump back and forth between passages in the text.

Text that is searchable, highlightable, and copyable

These features are more common in e-book reading platforms, but not universal. Freeda recently tried to copy a passage from an e-book in EBSCO in order to use the information for future reference, but she was unable. These kinds of technological controls are meant to prevent "unauthorized" or "illegal" use of the materials, but in an academic setting prevent perfectly legal, even desirable, uses and stifle productivity.

Consortium lending privileges 

The inability to lend e-books to students at other libraries is another casualty of the transition from physical ownership to digital leasing. Legally, libraries are able to lend the books they own to whomever they wish. But in the digital environment, we no longer own books. We sign licensing agreements. This allows publishers to assert all kinds of controls and limitation over how we use the content. Publishers have long been opposed to the First Sale Doctrine, which allows the owner of a book or a CD or any other item to sell that item to someone else, without paying the publisher. However, now that we do not own these books, we cannot lend them outside of our institutions and we cannot sell them when we are finished with them.

For libraries, the implications of not being able to lend e-books to consortium students are momentous, especially as we make efforts to increase our digital collections. Libraries join consortia in order to save money and still provide access to adequate resources, but as we shift more of our monograph purchases toward e-books, we are perhaps unintentionally decreasing the value of consortium memberships.  

There has been some progress on designing new lending options for consortia lending, but it is one among many lending options that is not available for all titles from all publishers.  The result is that students who attempt to use e-books are only presented with the confusing array of appearances and functionality of e-books if they can get into them in the first place.  A federated catalog displays e-books from consortium institutions and sometimes will and sometimes will not allow students into the book from those results.  If students already find the process of finding a book through the library complicated and confusing, we are only managing to make it worse through our e-book acquisition. 

Portability

Though academic reading is different than leisure reading, there are some areas where the features and abilities of leisure reading platforms (like the Kindle) would be beneficial for academic readers as well. Students should be able to download an e-book to their e-reader, tablet, or smart phone, and then access the content off-line, just as public library users can download e-books. In some cases this may mean making a work available in a variety of formats to facilitate use on different e-reader devices.

Permanence  

As we mentioned above, publishers of e-books have found ways to eliminate the pesky features associated with physical books, like ownership and the First Sale Doctrine. However, when those physical attributes work in publishers’ favor, they are happy to reproduce that feature digitally. Some publishers develop into the licensing agreements for e-books a maximum number of uses, so after the book has been checked out X many times it disappears from the collection. This is meant to mimic the deterioration of physical books. Here again, we should be taking advantage of the freedom associated with the digital format, and not build the bugs of physical books into the new medium.

Bottom line: Get rid of DRM
Many of the things we have mentioned above may fall under the heading of digital rights management. Publishers and platforms have different approaches to digital rights management for ebooks. Some publishers offer e-books more or less free of digital limitations. You can print or download whole chapters as PDFs. Others put up more barriers to access and use.

Say what you will about the need for protecting intellectual property, for us all of this DRM in libraries is rehashing territory we covered decades ago. Publishers have always had an uneasy, or even hostile, relationship with libraries. In the decades when public libraries were being built all over the country, publishers feared that libraries would ruin the market for books, and some publishers took legal action. Fortunately for everyone, they were not successful in curbing the functions of libraries. What was the impact of libraries on the book market? Libraries have created generations of literate, intellectually curious, book-reading citizens. Libraries have created more customers for book stores and publishers, not fewer.

The truth is, as online piracy becomes more widespread, and students become more technologically literate, readers will get their books without these restrictions--but they won't get them from libraries, and they won't get them from publishers, they'll get them on the black market.  If we want readers to use good sources, ethically, we need to provide them with resources that are useable and make sense--which simply means granting them access to their fair use rights in e-book form.

The ideas behind DRM are the same basic fear-based approach publishers historically have taken towards libraries, and it is based a flawed understanding of knowledge, and on knowledge acquisition. As Althea posted last week, reporting on a talk by Barbara Fister, "the resources that we offer are, in fact, renewed by use rather than depleted by it." Publishers should recognize that we add value by circulating these resources widely, and modify their services accordingly.

Meaning Making in the Library: My Response to ACRL NW 2012

It didn’t take me long after beginning my work in libraries to realize that the “librarian as guardian of knowledge” idea had become totally outdated the moment our information formats stopped being physically scarce. And Barbara Fister’s critique of the “library as warehouse of information” metaphor at last week’s ACRL NW Conference pushed me to think harder about a couple of key questions: If it’s not a scarcity of resources that gets people into the library, then what is it? Why does the library still hold such a privileged place in our collective imagination, even as it's lost that place in our collective wallet? And, finally, why do I love my job so much, what brings me such intense joy on the reference desk and in the classroom?

I think that beyond information, beyond knowledge, beyond the technology that we provide access to, there is something that the library and librarians facilitate that is as valuable now as it has ever been, and depends on our communities as much as it does on our facilities, technologies, and commodities.  I’m not talking about the writing of papers, or the accessing of e-reserves, or the time in the study room, or the reading of a call number.  I’m talking about the ideal end of all of that work: the making of meaning.

Why do we ask our students to read, to write, to solve, to collaborate?  As educators, we hope that our students’ lives will be enriched by the connections that they make in the classroom.  I argue that that is precisely the beautiful, rich, hard work that I see happening around me, daily, in the library.  What is the library if not a rich site of contextualization?   To that end:

• We provide group study rooms so that students can build off of each other’s work to make something better than they could have made on their own.   
• We fill our shelves with the intellectual work of others so that our readers can discover that their experiences have been shared, or that others’ lives are profoundly different from their own.   
• We wait at the reference desk so that we can encourage the asking of deeper, more probing, more thoughtful questions.   

I feel most exhilarated at work not when I find exactly the fact that a student was looking for, but when I can see in a student’s face the dawning of a connection between their own experience/curiosity/question with another’s work/words/thoughts.

The UW Bothell, where I work, organizes a significant portion of its Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences curriculum around the “Banking Concept of Education” chapter of Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed. It struck me that both Barbara Fister and Char Booth, in their keynote addresses at ACRL NW also used the “banking concept” as an important metaphor to work against.  In this chapter, Freire describes a prevailing attitude toward education that conceptualizes the transmission of information as being a uni-directional flow from the teacher to the student.  This disempowering process devalues the experiences, expertise, and contexts of the student and privileges the teacher as a single authority figure who embodies the “right” kind of knowledge (Freire 72).  Freire instead advocates for a decentralized power structure in the learning environment which recognizes what every member of the community brings to that new context and remakes every student as a teacher, and every teacher as a student.  In this model, the knowledge flow is multi-directional and meaning is made collaboratively in a process that he calls “mutual humanization” (75).

It is no surprise that Freire came up so frequently at this conference, because we are at a moment in our history as a profession when we are liberated from many of the old metaphors that have hemmed us in and occupied our time.  We all know, now, that information is easy to come by, but meaningful information is created, not stumbled upon.  We, as librarians, teachers, learners, and community members, have the license to communicate openly and lovingly with our intellectual communities.  We get to support and be supported by their ideas, energy, passions, questions, and labor.  And in that process, if we are open, passionate, and hardworking ourselves--if we maintain a position of radical curiosity toward our community members, library users, and environment--we can make beautiful meaning together.

Freire, Paulo.  Pedagogy of the Oppressed. 30^th Anniversary Ed. New York: Continuum, 2010. Print.

The Power of Narrative: ACRL NW 2012

This summer, Bookaneer Freeda Brook wrote an impassioned post about the specious stories of demise that are so popular in current discourse about libraries ("The Stories We Tell About Ourselves") after reading "The End of the Twighlight Doom" by Barbara Fister.  Brook ended her piece with a call for more of us to tell the stories of flourishing that constitute our daily experiences of the libraries in which we work, study, socialize, and grow.  It seems that ACRL NW heeded her call, and made the power of narrative the focus of this year's conference of Washington and Oregon librarians entitled: Libraries Out Loud: New Narratives of Enduring Value.  The conversations that followed both the opening and closing keynote addresses were exhilarating, as we all felt the power of our ability to collectively shape the conversation around libraries, learning and information.

We were lucky enough to have Barbara Fister herself as the opening keynote speaker (you can find the full text of her speech here, and I highly encourage you to read it).  Fister contextualized the current crisis narrative within a larger capitalism-flavored movement to monetize experience and fit research and learning into a purely  transactional model.  The overarching story under which we currently operate, goes a little something like this:

Information is something manufactured elsewhere and stored at the library.

For students, she said, that means that,

Authority exists outside of themselves and students come to the library to shop for nuggets of information.  Research is perceived as monetizeable and publications are tokens of productivity.

In this narrative, the library is the information wallet for the larger community of readers, researchers, and reluctant students on our campuses.  The bulk of our interactions with students and faculty revolve around buying resources, and then helping readers to access--through numerous convoluted pathways that have been predetermined by licensing agreements and copyright--what we’ve bought.  While we may bemoan the phenomenon of students who scan articles for useable quotes, we actively participate in this model by working within a market-oriented framework that emphasizes access and productivity over contemplation and creativity. 

But, Fister reminded us, markets, consumption, and monetizeation “are not always what people respond to.”  In fact, she estimates that it is the sense of the library as the intellectual commons of our institutions and communities that continues to bring folks to the library (be it virtual or physical).  In a sense, she suggested, it is our own inability, as librarians, to believe in the possibility of the commons—our buying into the narrative of the “tragedy of the commons”—that has allowed that commons to be enclosed around us in the form of skyrocketing prices, staff reductions, closures, and changes in our service orientation.

Fister called for a reinvigoration of the scholarship that we embody, support, collect, and make sense of by conceiving of it as a republic populated by peers.  Librarians, she said, are wonderfully positioned between professors and students.  We witness the research and discovery process on the part of students, we watch them work, and often, we are there to help them when they run into trouble.  At the same time, we attend department meetings, retreats, and trainings with faculty; we watch them develop reading lists and syllabi, and hear about the agony of the grading process.  We can act as well-informed translators between both kinds of work that we, too, wrestle with.  To that end, Fister called for a rejection of the crisis narrative of libraries, and called for, rather, a celebration of all the work that we excel at, a celebration of the collective, collaborative knowledge work that is done in and through the library.

Char Booth, in her closing keynote (slides here), responded beautifully to Fister’s themes by asking us to embrace the crisis narrative—not as something new and terrifying, but as an old story that signals the centrality of the library to major societal shifts in communication.  “Libraries” she said, have a very real history of decline, destruction, and displacement: they “have a history of being burned to the ground because it is a swift way to destroy a culture.”

Because libraries are, at their core, about the communication of knowledge, our seams will be strained every time there is a major shift in the modes of information distribution and communication.  “Libraries should not be an easy thing to advocate for,” according to Booth, because we have to respond, reshape, and revalue ourselves to stay useful to our communities with “every great format change” that the world undergoes.  This constant crisis state, she said, keeps us sharp.

Keeping that in mind, Booth urged us not to focus on the "container" and "content" metaphors that are so prevalent in narratives about the library as a place that holds books, because, when the boundaries of the physical library start to blur into virtual space, and the boundaries of books begin to dissolve into the ether of e-resources, we risk disappearing from the cultural narrative.  Rather, she suggests, we should focus on "concept" metaphors that speak to the lived experiences that most of us have about the library, or librarians--those positive, powerful, life-affirming narratives that communicate what we see people doing with and in the library: the sleeping, the growing, the making out, the writing, the sharing that has made the library a center of vibrant life on our campuses.

Though Fister and Booth fundamentally differed in their approach to the crisis narrative, each was saying essentially the same thing: we must put the emphasis back on our core values when we shape the narrative of the library in today's society, because those values speak to the role that we play in people's lives--not just the space we take up on our campuses.  The walls may tumble, and the books may crumble, but libraries are here to stay.