Washington, D.C.
October 18-20, 1995

Building Partnerships that Shape the Future

Jstor: Question and Answer Session

MR. FRAZIER (University of Wisconsin): I am profoundly impressed by your presentation. In fact, it may even be better than you say. If it works, it could be actually fast, cheap, and good, defying the marketing triangle, which, as you may know, is a theory that says you can only have two out of those three. The example of fast food comes to mind. Now there’s a model.

It may be better for us in a number of ways as well. At the University of Wisconsin we have more than five runs of many journals, so we could actually experiment very seriously with this without giving up our existing paper runs. I wonder, though, if it would be proper for me to inquire on a detail, and that is the people in Barbados, are they paid a prevailing wage?

DR. BOWEN: Absolutely.

MR. FRAZIER: Do they work in humane working conditions, and are they able to feed their families and have a standard of life that is appropriate for their economic environment?

DR. BOWEN: Yes, of course. It’s an absolutely appropriate question. We would not have contracted with the vendor who put the project there if we had not been satisfied on all those points. Kevin was actually there, and can tell you more. Kevin?

MR. GUTHRIE: I had very much the same concern when we were doing this. I think there are two things to say about the actual scanning process. One is that we really can’t be beholden to a single source for that task, although we are right now. We will have multiple people doing that job for us.

Second, and to answer your question more directly, I went to Barbados at the end of the summer and was actually surprised, shocked — the working conditions are really quite amazing. Every work station has a lot of space, and the people work in a very comforable environment.

They are paying much less than what we would pay people to do that job in the U.S. The vendor has made the choice to put the job there especially because of that so that they can remain competitive, but the wage is prevailing for Barbados, and we will continue to look at other sources for doing this work.

DR. BOWEN: May I just add a comment, again, from the economist standpoint? This is a highly labor-intensive process, because of the way the OCR is corrected. There are what are called “pop-ups” on the screen. At the top of the screen you see the OCR text, and at the bottom of the screen you see the bitmap images. The person making the corrections compares the two halves of the page. The pop-up feature, similar to a spell-check, identifies words that are not in the computer’s dictionary, the person then makes the correction, and then that person’s work is checked. So there is a lot of labor put into this process, and that, I’m sure, is why essentially all of the OCR work is done outside of the United States.

MS. MONTGOMERY: I’m Margot Montgomery from the Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (CISTI) in Ottawa. Could you elaborate a bit about the way in which the project is being presented and reacted to by commercial publishers? Are you making presentations to, or do you have a communications plan related to that potential partnership community?

DR. BOWEN: We are a tiny band of warriors, so we are really not making presentations. Kevin Guthrie, Dick De Gennaro and others will, I know, expand the conversations. We have deliberately kept this all low-key until we were sure we had something, but I will say this: one of the key journals in the first group is A Review of Economics and Statistics, which is owned in an unbelievably complicated way by the Economics Department at Harvard, by Elsevier, and others. Nobody could even figure out who had the rights to all of the back issues. So finally Elsevier just sent us a letter that said, fine, do whatever you want to do.

Because we are a tiny band of warriors, keeping quality high and getting everything right from the beginning is really very important, so, instead of trying to blanket the world, we are focusing on core disciplines in the arts and sciences. That’s why ecology was a natural choice for us, as are mathematics, economics, history, and English literature, and then, in those core disciplines, to look initially to the major nonprofit publishers as partners, because the whole notion of partnership, rebate, and giving back makes sense for them, and we are used to working with them.

Now, that’s not to say that we have any ideological opposition to commercial publishers. Many of them are actually good friends of mine, but I don’t think it’s the place to start. I think it would add a whole level of complication that would probably be more than we could handle initially, but I would be interested in your thoughts if you think that’s a wrong approach.

MS. MONTGOMERY: I certainly agree with the approach. I just see the wars to come.

DR. BOWEN: I think one useful function we will fulfill, I have to say this very carefully now, is to set some sort of standard for quality, for access, and for pricing that will not be binding, but that may actually have some influence.

If you want to draw other inferences, you can, but we are determined, and this is why we have taken this on ourselves and set it up as a nonprofit system, that this not be simply commercialized.

MS. MONTGOMERY: Thank you.

MR. GUTHRIE: If I could just add one thing. The tiny band of warriors is working very hard on the nonprofit side, but also with the scholarly associations. Actually, Richard Ekman and I will be at the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) meeting in November, where we will try to tell the value story, if you will, to publishers of this same thing. The value story is an important part of our strategy in terms of getting out and becoming successful with this. We’re on it all the time.

DR. BOWEN: If anyone has thoughts as to the publishers or societies you think would find this interesting in early days or that you would recommend we give some priority to when getting started, we would really appreciate hearing from you, because early on we have to make some very careful choices regarding partners.

MS. von WAHLDE (SUNY, Buffalo): In the universe of publishers of scholarly material, there exist commercial publishers and many societies and associations, and I’m assuming, then, that the remaining category is university press publishers that have journals?

DR. BOWEN: Right.

MS. von WAHLDE: I’m curious, in terms of your expansion of these different publishing arms, what your strategy might be to work and talk with them.

DR. BOWEN: That’s a first-rate question. I might say that the University of Chicago Press is the publisher of two of the first four journals up: The Journal of Political Economy and The Journal of Modern History. The other two, The American Economic Review and The American Historical Review, are publications from a society, so we have both groups represented initially.

The publishers in general, though, whether they be societies or university presses, are understandably puzzled as to where the world is going and what their future is. There is in some of them, but not all by any means, a kind of bunker mentality; that is, they are very concerned about giving up anything that might ultimately be of some value to them, and so they tend to be very cautious and very conservative.

One of the great virtues of working with the ecologists was that they had a more adventuresome spirit. I think if this initial project with them works as well as we hope it will, that it will be reassuring a great many people who have the best will in the world, but are just afraid of doing something that will really harm them or their journal.

Now, I should say one other word about the societies, who are, in some ways, more complicated than the university presses. Why? Because they care about membership. For example, the American Economic Association has 28,000 members. They are actually less worried about subscription revenue from the individuals than they are about their membership decline, because they really care how many members there are in their association.

So what they are now being forced to think about is something the ecologists already have thought about, which is, what benefits can members get that are not just tied to the journal? That’s what everyone will have to think about.

Much is going to depend on the elasticity of demand, on whether the appeal of this new beast is sufficient to cause individuals to put great value on being able to have access at home, and whether or not their institution has a site license. We will just have to see how strong that appeal is.

MR. GUTHRIE: The question of individual subscriptions, as Bill has pointed out, is extremely important. I just want to make sure from the last comment about membership organizations having to find other services to provide their members, we definitely believe that that’s true, but that does not mean that we are expecting that the individual subscriptions would or should go down. We are not trying to kill those off. The concept of giving, of having libraries distribute to the network, will necessitate our thinking seriously about the impact on the individual subscribers.

DR. BOWEN: In the long run, the economics of scholarly communication will be viable for everybody, for the libraries, for the publishers, and for the institutions, if the costs are shared in some reasonable way, not cost shifting, but equitable sharing among individual users who can pay for and make active use of this. It’s the notion of everybody chipping in a little bit that is that must be pursued here.

VOICE: Have you given consideration to the issues surrounding maintaining and migrating a very large database over time and what effect that has on your costs?

MR. GUTHRIE: I’ll say this: it’s a standard part of the way we are looking at the progression, not just a long-view question. Right now we have a database at the University of Michigan. It’s at that place in that hardware on the software that they developed. We are not comfortable with saying that the only place that it can exist is there on that server. In fact, we are already working on this question of migrating the Michigan version of this database onto commercial search engine platforms in another location. So, it’s something that we’re thinking about from the very start. We recognize that it is going to have to be done on a regular basis.

DR. BOWEN: A business member of our board said, “Never let your spending get too far ahead of your learning.” The person who made that comment also understood that we simply have to invest up front in duplicating the base, in finding different servers. We are going to have to spend money initially, but have we taken those considerations into account in the numbers I was quoting to you? Yes, we have. I think that doing that, doing it properly, it will still work, if we get enough interest.

MS. TAYLOR (Brown University): I think one of the challenges that all of us face on our campuses is the constant unending need to upgrade equipment in order to keep up with the advances in the technologies. I know, certainly on our campus, we have lots of faculty and lots of people in the library with work stations that at this point can’t handle Netscape or the Web, for example. I was wondering if this had been talked about in terms of what kind of hardware and software a user will have to have to get to this wonderful archive.

MR. GUTHRIE: Well, right now it is a Netscape-based database. You would need World Wide Web access to be able to get to it. That is what we are able to do right now. I think part of our hope is that things are moving quickly enough into a direction that will include other people. We don’t right now have an effort to put it on other platforms, but it is something that we would definitely look at as we go forward. I think it is one of the questions that we can’t really assess until we get the basic program up and going and see how that works, but it is something at which we will continue to look.

DR. BOWEN: What we did do for the test site libraries in the five colleges is provide them with very modest hardware allotments to be sure they had proper equipment so we would get a fair test. This turned out to not be that expensive. It is something we have thought about, but for which we don’t have all of the answers.

MR. GUTHRIE: The equipment is standard PCs. The printers are standard laserjet printers. I think a bigger question, in the long run, regards issues such as band width. From that standpoint, and because one of our goals is to distribute overseas to places that may not have connectivity, we will look at CD-ROM options, also.

DR. BOWEN: I should just say that at our own site in New York we have very modest band width, and, as a result, we see this project operating less well than Don would see it operating at Michigan, because band width clearly affects the speed with which all this works.

MR. RIGGS: Don Riggs, University of Michigan. After Bill’s presentation at the Economics of Information Conference, some of you asked if Michigan could share the search engine with you. We cannot do so currently, because it’s not properly documented, but in time I think we can. It is the same search engine that we use for the TULIP project.

Again, I want to take this opportunity to just say how pleased the University of Michigan is in working with The Mellon Foundation, with Bill and Kevin. We’re doing great things there, and we appreciate the cooperation.

DR. BOWEN: Well, Michigan’s been terrific. Thank you all for your patience.