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

Building Partnerships that Shape the Future

AAU/ARL Research Libraries Action Agenda: An Update and Map Check

Convened by Jerry Campbell
Presiding President
ARL

MR. CAMPBELL: I would like to give a brief introduction as we go into Program Session I. We have a panel here to update you on the ARL joint project with the Association of American Universities (AAU). To do that we have members of the AAU/ARL Steering Committee, Betty Bengtson, Elaine Sloan, and Susan Nutter. We will also hear from Duane Webster, Executive Director of ARL, and John Vaughn, Executive Officer AAU.

It was an interesting experience for us to meet with the AAU presidents on the Steering Committee recently, and I want to provide an overview as introduction.

I want to communicate the sense of urgency with which the presidents view the project and the calendar with which they want us to pursue it. There was a slight difference in how long each of us thought it would take to upscale the pilot projects, but the bottom line is that we are going to have the plan for the upscale available to the AAU in April.

The second thing I want to emphasize is that we continue to face difficulties in the uneasy relationship between the educational world and the commercial publishing world: there is nothing in our recent experience that allows us to trust commercial publishers. So there is also the concern that we rapidly create a viable, not-for-profit, scholarly network alternative for publishing, so that higher education may begin to own and control its own information and access to it.

With those introductory comments, I now turn the podium over to Duane.

MR. WEBSTER: The original efforts in these areas were begun under the sponsorship of the Association of American Universities. The presidents of those institutions expressed an interest in better understanding the problems and challenges facing the future of research libraries.

Their interest centered around concern that the rising cost of information, the rising volume of information, and the proliferation of formats of information would simply make it impossible to maintain a status quo over any sort of time. They were aware of the journal pricing pressures on libraries, and they were looking for a way to respond to those issues in a practical, concrete, action-oriented way. So AAU asked ARL to meet with them to look at what some of these difficulties might be.

There are 60 institutions belonging to AAU, and the presidents of these institutions are the people who attend their meetings, engage the issues, and work on the interests of the Association. The Association does not have a project-operating capability like ARL; the presidents consider this set of economic and scholarly communication issues a fundamental concern to the future of academic institutions, and they asked ARL to work with them on an initial project.

The project started in 1992. It involved an AAU steering committee that was initially chaired by Hanna Gray, from the University of Chicago. Her leadership was a very important stimulus in capturing the presidents’ interest, beginning the process, and getting involvement from significant leaders within AAU.

There were three AAU task forces initially. Out of those three task forces, Acquisition and Distribution of Foreign Language and Area Studies Materials, Scientific and Technical Information, and Intellectual Property, we were able to identify a series of themes, a series of issues, and, most importantly, at least from the presidents’ point of view, a joint AAU/ARL action agenda. The reports of these task forces were published in 1994 and are available at http://www.arl.org/aau/frontmatter.html.

Now, it is relatively unusual for the AAU presidents to be willing to maintain an interest in a set of issues from the point of identifying an action to moving to implementation, but in this instance they have been very much interested in staying involved and working with us to move these issues along.

As a result, we were able to move from that initial project with three task forces to the creation of a steering committee to oversee what is now characterized as an AAU/ARL joint project. To better advance that agenda we have two devices.

The first is the Intellectual Property Task Force. This group is really an extension of the first task force with this title, but it has broadened its scope to include exploration of the creation of alternative scholarly electronic publishing networks; looking at how universities can refine and/or define their policies on the use of intellectual property on their campuses; and looking at alternative ways of managing that intellectual property. The Task Force has also been very interested in looking at the implications of the ITTF White Paper and proposed legislation for the future of intellectual property within the university setting.

The other device that we have established is the Global Resources Pilot Project. The focus is on increasing access to a broader array of global information resources. Through the three pilot projects encompassed in the Global Resources Pilot Project (the Latin Americanist Research Resources Pilot Project, the Japanese Scientific and Technical Information Demonstration Project, and the German Demonstration Project) we are looking at developing a readily available, electronically distributed set of information resources throughout North America.

We have been very fortunate to have had the support of Richard Ekman and the Mellon Foundation in getting funding to advance the Latin American Project. As a result, this project has been the most visible, and the one where we have made the most progress.

Activities in the Intellectual Property Task Force and the Global Resources Pilot Projects since 1994, when the Task Forces made their reports and the agenda was established, are described in the ARL Activities Report (see Appendix III). We have been able to do a fair amount of work in a relatively short time frame.

Let me just mention some of the players in these activities. The Research Libraries Steering Committee has co-chairs, and it is important to note that at this time we have a co-chair who is a university librarian (Jerry Campbell, Duke University) and one who is a university president (Myles Brand, Indiana University).

Myles Brand assumed leadership of the first Steering Committee from Hanna Gray, and he has taken a strong, energetic, and personal involvement in directing this project. The other university presidents on the steering committee are Robert Prichard, University of Toronto; Donald Langenburg, University of Maryland; M. Peter McPherson, Michigan State University; and Harold Shapiro, Princeton University.

Each AAU president has been involved in one or more of the meetings. I am particularly pleased to see Canadian involvement from Rob Pritchard, who has taken a very active interest in these issues and presents a valuable perspective, particularly on intellectual property issues. Finally, John Vaughn, AAU, and I have been the supporting staff for the Steering Committee.

The Intellectual Property (IP) Task Force includes a range of talented faculty, university press representatives, scholars, and librarians. We have established advisory committees for each of the demonstration projects. There are also a number of groups involved in an advisory and a governing role in this project. From the ARL point of view, the Board of Directors is the overall coordinating group. It is the one that reviews all of the decisions and activities and is, of course, our point of departure supporting or acting on a recommendation.

The standing committees are a crucial source of advice and help in advancing the work of these project groups. In particular, the Research Collections Committee has taken a very active role in shepherding along the Global Resources Pilot Projects. They have both created the vision of where we want to go with this concept of a distributed network of resources, and they have been directly involved in designing the project, taking responsibility for making it work, and advising the separate groups that are overseeing the work.

ARL’s Working Group on Copyright, which is made up of representatives from all of the standing committees that have an interest in intellectual property and copyright issues, has also played an important advisory role for the IP Task Force.

We also try to keep you, the membership, informed of these rapidly moving projects, making sure that you not only understand what is happening, but that you have an opportunity to get involved. We use, of course, the ARL Newsletter and the monthly electronic news. The last three or four issues have all covered some portion of the activities, focusing particularly on the work of the Intellectual Property Task Force.

Let me briefly review for you the AAU/ARL Steering Committee meeting in Boulder last Sunday. The Steering Committee meets twice a year where the presidents are meeting. In these last discussions there was great interest in aggressively pushing forth the following three areas.

First of all, there was a very strong interest in having the IP Task Force prepare a preliminary document exploring options for establishing an investment vehicle for a variety of ways to provide electronic network-based scholarly publishing. This is an effort to attract investments from the university presidents to support experimental projects that would create alternatives to the currently available, and highly expensive, scholarly publishing resources.

The second focus of the Boulder discussions was on the question: What might constitute the terms of reference in a model comprehensive license for copyright permissions through the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC)? The Task Force will look at whether there is enough interest to continue negotiations or discussions on such a license.

Finally, there was a great deal of support for the concept of building a distributed collection of resources that would broaden the pool of information available to scholars within the university environment, while sustaining costs.

Their question is how to move quickly to this concept of a distributed collection. We have been very much focused on making the pilot projects work, and we are very pleased with the extent to which member libraries are involved with each of the three projects, allowing us to assess their experiences with a view toward identifying the best way of scaling it up. However, we are under considerable pressure from the presidents to not spend these three pilot years doing something that would require scaling up in over a ten or 20 year period. They want to be able to build on the success of these pilot projects as quickly as possible.

On a continuing basis there are very broad strategic concerns, as well. We want to look at how best to use investments in the research library to broaden access and to assure richness of collections. We also need to devise a way to integrate the new electronic information resources into our systems of access, to make sure that these new models are economically sustainable, and to ensure equitable access. This broad range of concerns is what we are specifically focusing on with the work of the Intellectual Property Task Force and Global Resources Pilot Projects.

MR. CAMPBELL: Thank you, Duane. I’d like to ask John if he would report to us on the AAU Executive Committee response to these activities, and anything else he would add.

MR. VAUGHN: These projects, particularly the electronic scholarly publishing project and the proposal to explore some alternatives to copyright arrangements through site licensing, are the kinds of projects that have some real risks involved in them. Presidents are often risk-aversive, but this is a case where they really have been anxious to provide resources and move more rapidly than usual.

One of the specific proposals that is embedded in this, and that was discussed in some detail with the AAU Executive Committee right after the Steering Committee met, is the notion that, when we meet again next April, we request that all AAU institutions commit some amount of money, $30,000 was the amount talked about, to support projects that we would collectively manage, providing new forms of scholarly communication in the electronic environment.

If we propose this as a blanket fee for all institutions, it would be literally unprecedented. For most of the activities AAU is involved in there is a general sense that the institutions’ financial commitment is limited to their dues, but there was surprisingly strong support for this request.

So really, to use a cliché that I think is really quite appropriate now, the ball is in our court. The presidents are receptive to a proposal. They are pressing us to move these three interrelated activities as rapidly as we can. If we can put together a package that makes sense, I think that the organization is going to take this on and commit the financial resources necessary, and, probably even more importantly, commit the institutional resources in terms of administrative support.

So what we plan to do is send out a written description of our work between now and April so that the presidents will be able to have their appropriate institutional people, be they provosts, general counsels, or library directors, take a close look at these proposals. It will give them an early warning, an opportunity to talk this through, so that they will come to the April meeting willing to make a decision and make a commitment.

Now, it could be that when we send out what we are working on and they see it in writing and share it with their colleagues, it will all fall apart, but I hope not. There is a willingness now to take hold of this opportunity and develop a genuinely university-managed mode of scholarly communication. Peter Nathan, University of Iowa and chair of the IP Task Force, gave a description of the general terms aimed to increase access, reduce cost, and enhance quality of scholarly information; and Jerry Campbell talked about this endeavor as developing in a not-for-profit environment. These general concepts, I believe, are the ones to which the presidents are most attracted.

There is an important dimension to this that has some broader ramifications. That is that all the institutions that participate in such new modes of communication will make the necessary arrangements so that faculty involvement in this will be reflected favorably in promotion and tenure decisions. If that kind of principle is embedded in this from the presidents of the institutions on down, there will be a critical connection between what we are trying to do and faculty willingness to participate in it.

I am really quite encouraged, and I am quite confident that, if we put together the right kind of package with the right properties, we will have the backing of the CEOs of these institutions.

MR. CAMPBELL: Let’s invite questions from the membership.

MS. TAYLOR (Brown University): I was wondering what the involvement of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) is in a couple of the projects that are related to digital publishing and copyright licenses.

MR. WEBSTER: The Coalition has been involved in the progress of the project from the beginning, and Paul Peters, as CNI Executive Director, was one of the staff members who we were able to draw upon to support the Scientific and Technical Information Task Force. We have not moved to a point where we are defining organizations’ roles in the network for scholarly publishing or in the development of the proposal, so it’s fair to say that it is still open.

MR. VAUGHN: There is obviously an awful lot going on in this area, and, in the discussion with the Steering Committee, one of the things that came up was their anxiousness to look at these three AAU/ARL initiatives in more detail in order to see how they relate to other ongoing activities.

As you all know, the Mellon Foundation has a very ambitious agenda, and they are making enormous progress in a lot of these areas. As part of our further development, it is important to get a clear sense of other initiatives that are being undertaken, in order to not duplicate things others are doing, and to make sure that we have a complimentary approach that will help fill in the gaps and move the overall effort forward.

MR. CAMPBELL: Yes. It does seem that one of the key tasks of the moment is weaving together a rational, integrated network approach to what are now a number of disparate projects. That may be a role that AAU/ARL can play here.

MR. STUDER (Ohio State University): Could you say something more about this interest in a comprehensive licensing program? Where is that going to move?

MS. SLOAN (Columbia University): I would not characterize that proposal as moving with any rapidity. If you recall, the Scholarly Communications Committee had a conversation with someone from CCC talking about their proposal. The Intellectual Property Task Force took this idea forward, has been looking at the pros and cons. At the recent Steering Committee meeting we talked about the issues and encouraged the Intellectual Property Task Force to continue this sort of examination so that the membership could be more fully informed of the issues. We did not give them any approval to go forward with any kind of negotiation, but they are continuing conversations, explorations, and particularly information collection.

MR. STUDER: I took this to mean that the presidents grabbed hold of this with some degree of interest. Was that a misinterpretation?

MR. VAUGHN: This again was discussed at some length with the AAU Executive Committee, and I think there is really understanding that there are a lot of risks along with some opportunities here. Rob Prichard was quite clear that he was a dissenter, given the Canadian experience with comprehensive copyright licensor agreements, to pursue a comprehensive licensing arrangement at this time. We hope to have some feasibility discussions without making any commitments.

We do have concerns that by accretion you can, through individual institutional commitments, create an environment that is not in the best interests of higher education. Obviously, we would have more influence if we address these issues together.

So, there is an interest in exploring whether a licensing program is a feasible approach, but, in the meantime, there is a clear understanding that we aren’t at all ready to make any binding commitments. That is where things stand.

MS. NUTTER (North Carolina State University): We also felt that it was important to see what was going to develop with regard to copyright law revisions, and we are not anxious to enter into any agreements or arrangements until that outcome is clearer.

MR. NEAL (Johns Hopkins University): The Working Group on Copyright had an extensive discussion on Wednesday about the CCC proposal, and endorsed the plan to focus on the definition of terms in such a license, instead of moving too quickly into actual negotiation.

We also thought it was important to look at the Canadian licensing agreement that is currently in place. There are some important differences, but that experience would be critical to our own progress here in the States.

We were concerned that the CCC proposal under discussion in the IP Task Force, as it currently stands, appropriately puts a great deal of focus on library related issues, but gives little or no attention to faculty and student perspectives in terms of how the agreement might affect research and learning activities on our campuses.

We also noted that the proposal is primarily analog-based, and it is very critical that any agreement that we discuss needs to embrace digital resources as well.

MR. BILLINGS (University of Texas): To some extent I find this a little bit vague at the moment, and I wish there were a way of sharpening what it means to have the ball back in our court.

Generally speaking, when we start talking about institutions contributing $30,000 to library programs, the issue of money comes back in our court, not out of the institutions. So I’m wondering whether we are going to get into a position of where that institutional commitment shows up first. In terms of a request to the presidents for the institutions to provide funds, will this ball come back into our budget court, which typically seems to happen?

How are we supposed to sharpen the ball game and move on in a very specific way? Also, in terms of the commitment from the AAU presidents, are we looking at going directly to them for funds?

MR. VAUGHN: Harold asks disconcertingly piercing questions, but the answer I would give is that we haven’t yet filled out the critical details of how to spend $1.8 million, if we were to generate that pool of money. How we would manage that fund of venture capital and what kind of committee we would put together to judge who gets proposals funded and who doesn’t is one part of the set of steps we have to take.

In terms of scaling up the Global Resources efforts, I think a number of us were struck by the differential progress that is being made in those three projects, Latin American, Japan, and Germany, and what you can trace this to the level of financial and managerial commitments to each. They have encountered a great deal of cultural resistance, understandably. Faculties see that their resources may be threatened with new shared arrangements.

Duane and I have talked about trying to get a committee of provosts to work collectively to start finding, from the top of the institutions, the kinds of decisions and commitments that have to be made in order to move more rapidly to distributed collections.

So what we need to do between now and April is spell out some formal proposals. There has been some discussion about where $30,000, for example, would come from. We probably won’t be directive on that, but we may make some recommendations. It is exactly the sort of issue that we have to spell out, to move from general concepts to specific operating projects.

MR. WEBSTER: I might also add that there is documentation available, and at our meeting last fall the Research Collections Committee presented a rather detailed, comprehensive, and strategic plan for where we want to go with the distributed library. So that has been described and documented, and you have had a chance to look at that.

There are other documents involved here that are works of art in process. They have been developed by the Task Force on Intellectual Property, and they have been presented to the presidents. We have also given them to the ARL groups that are providing advice and input to those efforts, but as I noted earlier, they are not yet ready for general distribution.

The presidents have given us very specific instructions on how they would like to see the documents developed. So part of moving this ball forward, and John suggested that the presidents would like to see this, is to have an additional group to support the Global Resource Pilot Projects. That group might well be a group of provosts with a group of librarians, making sure that whatever is designed is feasible.

MS. SLOAN: I would just like to add, Harold, that some of your impatience was also present in the Steering Committee meeting last Sunday, as was the question about where the money would finally come from. I would just add that the work the Task Force brought to us were concept papers. They wanted the Steering Committee’s approval to go forward. It’s not quite vaporware, Harold. There are some strong ideas. They just have to be fleshed out.

Certainly one of the issues that was not dealt with in the concept paper, but has been alluded to here, is the very critical issue of the organization of these several projects, providing us with a whole, something we can look at, examine, and evaluate as it proceeds.

MS. von WAHLDE (SUNY-Buffalo): This is going to require some planning and discussion on our campuses. I would like to interject a note of skepticism from my own perspective. I certainly endorse these combined efforts, and I think it is extraordinary that we have captured the presidents’ attention. I’m not so sure that when we get to the local level, though, that our presidents will be very interested.

There are many other things on their minds, and you’re talking about the two biggest black holes on the campus in terms of this electronic network: the library and the computing center. I don’t see, and perhaps I’m wrong, where you are getting input from people involved with telecommunications, networking, and wiring on campus. You must integrate those players if you expect to create the scholarly network of which we are speaking. Maybe there is a way to add some additional people or think about how to bring in that constituency, because they are the support people that will make this work. I would be thrilled if, through peer pressure, my president were willing to look at these issues on the campus, giving them a higher priority than I think they currently do.