Building Partnerships That Shape the Future Papers presented at the recent ARL Membership Meeting program are being published electronically as they are received: see ARL's WWW server . Excerpts from three papers follow. JSTOR and the Economics of Scholarly Communication ...JSTOR" (our acronym for "journal storage"), this denizen of electronic databases, began life as one of several demonstration projects funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, moved rapidly from infancy to adolescence, and now enjoys an independent existence, having been incorporated as a separate nonprofit entity within the last few months. Early on, we explained our plans to the head of one widely known commercial enterprise, who was quick to comment: "No sane person would do what you propose." We were undeterred. We thought that we had an opportunity, and perhaps even an obligation, to make up front investments that could have long-term social value for the scholarly community at large. Unlike commercial entities, the test of success for us is not any "bottom line," but how well we facilitate teaching and scholarship by improving the mechanisms of scholarly communication. At the same time, we recognize that such broad statements of good intentions often mean little-as one of my friends likes to put it, "good intentions randomize behavior." Fiscal discipline is needed, and we have always believed that JSTOR would have to be self- sustaining eventually. Perpetual subsidy is both unrealistic and unwise: projects of this kind must make economic sense once they are up and running. If users and beneficiaries, broadly defined, are unwilling to cover the costs, one should wonder about the utility of the enterprise. In this important respect, we are strong believers in "market-place solutions"Qprovided that what the economist calls "externalities" can be captured. - William G. Bowen, President, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Realizing Benefits from Inter-institutional Agreements ...[C]opyright policy may become a significant restraint on inter-library cooperation. The Commerce DepartmentIhas now produced its White Paper[1] Ideliberately written as a legal brief, the rationale being that it is only a technical update on established legal understandings, an extension to accommodate new information technologies. In fact, the White Paper implies fundamental changes in copyright law, and these changes are partially concealed by the rhetorical structure of legal discourse. I'm particularly concerned about the economic impact of the newly defined "transmission right," that the transmission of copyrighted information by network will be defined as making an illegal copy. Transmission rights potentially add substantial costs to some of the most exciting technologies for access in higher education, particularly distance education and shared digital collections. If a copyright charge is added every time something is transmitted, the costs of using technology for shared information resources are going to be driven up dramatically. ...[T]acitly, the White Paper assumes that the market is the sole mechanism for achieving the public interest in access to information. In itself, the idea of transmission rights might be an effective way to help create a stable marketplace for electronic publication. Ominously, however, the White Paper is virtually silent on the issue of Fair Use in digital environments, deferring consideration of Fair Use until later. Transmission rights combined with silence about Fair Use, and a recommendation that licensing be the primary mode of access to information, is imbalanced public policy, designed to solve the problems of publishers without the concern for public education which is traditional in copyright policy. ...[T]he vital interests of public education are at stake in this discussion, and particularly in the silence about the status of Fair Use in digital environments; without Fair Use, and with copyright extended to include transmission rights, institutional cooperation will become more expensive. - Peter Lyman, University Librarian, University of California-Berkeley Realizing Benefits from Inter-institutional Agreements: The Implications of the CPA/RLG Draft Report of the Task Force on Digital Archiving [2] Can we generate an hypothesis about the current state of scholarly communication that frames the problems directlyQor at least more directlyQin terms of preservation? I believe that we can. Let us imagine that the core problem in the scholarly communication process for at least a subset of scholarly disciplines is that the conventional published record simply does not adequately capture the intellectual action. The real action occurs elsewhere: in online databases, online exchanges of pre-prints, listservs and so on. Conventional publication in these disciplines adds little value to the work that has already been disseminated in other channels; rather it is a redundant process, undertaken to generate, in effect, a certified archival record of the work. Because the audience paying attention to the field has already seen and absorbed the work in on-line versions, the printed publication channel grows increasingly narrow consisting primarily of libraries who serve as the archival institutions. Because of the narrow market, costs and prices consequently rise on the supply side. On the demand side, libraries respond by cutting titles from their collections. There is clearly little logic or economy in a process whereby scholars use printed publications to establish an archival record only to find that the institutions responsible for ensuring that the archive endures for future generations cannot afford to purchase the publications. Framed in this way, the problems in the scholarly communication system are archival problems, and a focus on tenure, the mechanics of print publication, electronic versions of print publications, and institutional retention of copyright is looking for solutions in all the wrong places-or at least not in some of the right places. ...[D]o we not also need to say bluntly that our own unwillingness or inability as archival institutions to provide a trustworthy archival record of substantially changed and changing intellectual activity is itself a critical barrier to the rehabilitation and renewal of a viable (read: affordable) system of scholarly communication? The process of coming to terms with each other, with our academic colleagues and with publishers about the investment we must make in the system of scholarly communication and the savings that we must extract from that system is essentially a coming to terms about the centrality of archiving-the embalming of dead genius-in the pursuit of knowledge... ...As we contemplate the archiving of digital information, we have to understand that we are not seeking to fine tune some technical variables of a system that is already long in place. While the goals are ultimately the same, we are not placing brittle books under a microfilm camera in a well-defined process. Instead, we are faced with what the Task Force report calls "a grander problem of organizing ourselves over time and as a society to maneuver effectively in a digital landscape" (Task Force 1995: 4). The effort to meet the cultural and economic imperatives of digital preservation requires us to build, almost from scratch, a system of infrastructure for moving the record of knowledge naturally and confidently into the future. - Donald J. Waters, Associate University Librarian, Yale University [1] Intellectual Property in the National Information Infrastructure, Information Infrastructure Task Force, Executive Office of the President, September 1995 . [2] Preserving Digital Information. Draft Report of the Task Force on Archiving of Digital Information commissioned by the Commission on Preservation and Access and The Research Libraries Group, August 24, 1995 . ------- ARL 183 A Bimonthly Newsletter of Research Library Issues and Actions Association of Research Libraries December 1995