Washington, D.C.
October 16-18, 1996

Redefining Higher Education

Changing Roles in Scholarly Communication

Sally Brown, Senior Vice-President
Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada

Introduction by

Carole Moore, Chief Librarian
University of Toronto

MS. MOORE: It is my very great pleasure to introduce Sally Brown, Senior Vice-President of the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada (AUCC). She joined the AUCC in 1991 as Vice-President for External Relations, and in 1995 she served as Acting President.

Prior to that, she was Special Advisor in the Prime Minister’s office, providing strategic policy and communications advice on a broad range of social and economic policy issues, including education, science, and technology, and the environment. She has also served as Vice-President of the Toronto Hospital, and holds several degrees from the University of Toronto, including a Master’s in Health Sciences.

Among her responsibilities at AUCC is copyright. In that role she has been a most energetic and effective leader in negotiations with the nonprofit Canadian copyright organization, CANCOPY. Sally has worked closely with the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) members both in that capacity and in the recent AUCC Task Force on Academic Libraries and Scholarly Communication. You will recognize the ARL members who served on the task force — Carolynne Presser, Claude Bonnelly, and I — along with two university presidents; two academic vice-presidents, two representatives of the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CASUL), and two faculty members who served as external reviewers, among others.

We are delighted that Sally has agreed to share her perspectives on Changing Roles in Scholarly Communication. Please help me in welcoming Ms. Brown to ARL.

MS. BROWN: Thank you.

It is important that the executive heads of the AUCC member institutions took on issues confronting academic libraries, having been approached by the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) to do so. Although any member of our Task Force on Academic Libraries and Scholarly Communication could have easily given this talk, perhaps it is significant, though, that it comes from someone from the AUCC. We hope now, through AUCC, CARL, and other bodies, that some of the Task Force’s recommendations will be given life, instead of just sitting on a shelf. I will speak about the Task Force, but also about many of Mr. Chodorow’s comments, because they are relevant here.

The Task Force was formed two years ago. We thought it would be a year-long process, but it has taken considerably more energy and time than we had originally envisioned. Just to review, the AUCC is a mini-ACE. We represent all of the degree-granting universities in Canada, excluding two-year community colleges.

When we first were approached by CARL to create a task force which would look at academic libraries, we thought we would spend a lot of time reviewing the work of AAU and ARL in the United States, and the Follett Commission work in the U.K. We did that, but then changed our focus and moved fairly quickly toward looking at the issues as they relate in a Canadian context.

This came about because, although we knew that we constantly had to be aware that we are impacted by what is going on internationally, we paid close attention to the Canadian issues, as well. We looked at Canada’s relationship with the United States, in particular, since Canada is a net importer of academic material. We wanted to come up with solutions that we could put in place in Canada and did not want to use the international nature of the problem as an excuse to wait and see what happened elsewhere. So we have changed form and format a few times, trying to figure out how to best deal with this problem and how to address the issues.

The Task Force was cyclical, so that when we were half-way through we all began to wonder if there was really anything that we could do. The problems seemed tremendous. The copyright issues, for example, are enormous because Canada is a net importer. So we began to ask ourselves, What can we do in terms of electronic journals if, internationally, there is not a movement toward them? This question led us to focus on what the Task Force could do in Canada.

We began to notice an increasing member engagement and interest in the questions we were raising, which energized us into making a decision to produce a discussion paper that would lay out the issues as we saw them, and see what response we got. We called our paper “Challenges and Choices for Canada,” and it focused on the things that we could do in Canada.

The other metamorphosis we made was as follows. We had originally defined the scholarly communication problem as a library problem, but by the end it was clear that this it was an even broader, academic problem. Most of the recommendations we received in reply to our paper were aimed at entities other than libraries, primarily targeting the academic scholars in our member institutions.

We also quickly stopped believing that more money was a solution and, after quite a few debates around technology, came to see the issues in a much more multi-dimensional way than we had initially perceived them. We first thought of technology as the driver of the problem and also the potential solution, but it is, of course, far more complex than that.

Over these two years things were also rapidly changing in Canada, so we were not reacting to a static environment. For example, one major consideration we needed to take into account is the fact that we are undergoing a copyright law reform bill in Canada. We were working with the Information Highway Advisory Council, which was set up by the federal government in this area, and which made a lot of valuable recommendations vis-a-vis copyright in the digital environment.

Another event that was happening at this time was that many of our major institutions, including the University of British Columbia, went through a Senate process looking at the role of librarians in academic committees, and as a result created an extremely useful document for the Task Force.

There are 28 recommendations in our report, and I will review a few of them. The report is available on the AUCC Web site at either http://www.aucc.ca/en/briefs/aucccarl.htm (English version), or http://www.aucc.ca/fr/briefs/aucccarl.htm (French version).

Problems

I would like to start off by reviewing the problems we are facing. The following problems were those that we listed in our discussion paper:

• soaring publication costs influenced by the increasing number and diversity of serials, monographs, and of users, as well as the fact that, particularly in Canada, users are geographically dispersed;

• the funding constraints on universities that are now being felt increasingly by libraries; and

• the surrender of copyright by scholars and their institutions, and the related flow and expense of a print-based publishing system.

After the discussion paper had been distributed, we received much comment about whether we were defining the problem correctly; we ended up adding two problems later. The first problem that we added was that of providing inequitable access to supporting technology in institutions. At the moment, certain disciplines have access to the technology that other disciplines do not have, and, if we are talking about the democratization of knowledge, then access to technology can become a barrier.

The second problem was what we defined as the loosely-coupled nature of the scholarly communication system. What we meant by that is that effecting change somewhere in the system may result in a change somewhere else. Unfortunately, one can never be quite sure what that other change will be.

Players

We started out our talks by defining the players. We have already discussed this morning the changing role of the librarian as the information specialist, and that was one of the points about which we had many discussions.

We talked about the chief players in academic publishing in Canada. As I mentioned, Canada is a net importer of material, and so this is a real issue for us. Naturally, we initially focused on the role of the commercial publishing houses and the soaring costs of periodicals to companies like Elsevier. However, there was also discussion regarding university presses and where they are heading in Canada. They are in some degree of difficulty as they are losing their university funding and being forced to act more like commercial publishing houses. The task force also looked at the role of the Federal Granting Councils and the incentives they provide. In Canada, the Councils used to provide a lot of money for scholarly publishing, but now that money is drying up. An impact will be felt, especially within the social sciences and humanities.

Some of our talks centered on the role of learned societies and how they can and do provide incentives, both positive and negative, in the scholarly communication process. Finally, we looked at the role of the faculty reward system (hiring, tenure, and promotion), and its effect on both the scholarly communication process and on copyright.

Copyright

The concept of fair dealing in Canada provides the exception for copyright infringement, for copying works for private study, and for research purposes. However, it is not as broadly defined as the Fair Use provision in the United States. Canada does, though, have a much better-designed system of copyright collectives, and we have a copyright collective now in Canada for reprographic reproduction of all works. During the course of the past two years, CANCOPY, as it is known, has begun to radically escalate its prices for scholarly material.

Now we are not only paying more for the original material, but also more for the right to photocopy the material for academic and research purposes. There is currently a great deal of debate in Canada’s creator community about whether there should even be a fair dealing exception. This coming together of the copyright issues and their impact on prices has forced us to look at the copyright model we use in our universities, and we are not optimistic.

We believe, though, that we can change the practice scholars have of giving up their copyright, and therefore their works, to academic publishers in order to be published. The task force came out of its examination of the situation saying that we must start contemplating how to change this, because we are now caught in a model that is moving us in the wrong direction.

A New Model

The three words we use to describe the new model are digital, dynamic, and democratic.

Originally we defined the model as a complete paradigm shift. However, we soon came to realize that it is not really a paradigm shift, but an evolutionary process where things are slowly becoming digitized, and where there is greater openness and sharing of knowledge and data. It is the democratization of the scholarly process.

Mr. Chodorow said that this process of digitization will allow undergraduates to have more and more access to the scholarly community and will therefore be able to become bigger players within the scholarly communication process. Furthermore, Mr. Chodorow mentioned that a more rapid exchange of knowledge is also changing the nature of scholarly discourse. I agree completely.

The two external reviewers we put on the task force were instrumental in articulating how their work has changed dramatically using new electronic resources. They use the Internet now to exchange data, and these informal data exchanges frequently lead to changes in their research. Thus, their research often goes in another direction before anything is ever published. This leads to questions regarding not only the reorientation of research, but also the results of such exchanges. Even if the exchanges are not published, they still constitute a growth in the body of knowledge. How is this captured for other scholars?

In order to learn more how the digitization of knowledge is affecting scholarship, the task force conducted an informal survey through University Affairs, which is a smaller version of The Chronicle of Higher Education that is published by AUCC and sent to every faculty member. We asked how faculty members are changing what they do.

• Ninety-five percent said they use the Internet once a day;

• Forty percent said that they visit the campus library less frequently than they used to;

• Forty percent use journals less often;

• Forty percent made less use of inter-library loan; and

• Forty-three percent said they did more collaborative research.

This was helpful for us by putting parameters around the ways in which access to scholarly communication is changing for our users.

Another topic that we took into consideration when forming our model was the future of electronic journals. One reason for concern is that we had, but have no longer, federal funding put towards developing electronic journals in Canada, under the mistaken perception that they would be cheaper than paper publications. This led, of course, to discussions about the pros and cons of digitizing existing material, and the challenges of archiving in the new environment.

We also had many discussions about the influence of library statistics on the scholarly communication system. While our task force was in place, CARL had formed its own task force on library statistics, so hopefully our task force discussions helped CARL and their work. CARL’s work focused on the need to look at new ways of calculating how people access information, replacing what is called the “tonnage model.” Without these new statistics we will always have pressure to build up library holdings in order to look good in various rankings. For example, the Claims ranking in Canada rates universities according to how many books the library has. It was recognized that these rankings skew the system in ways that we think are no longer appropriate.

Finally, a lot of discussion regarded quality and concerns that a move to a digital environment will raise issues around the quality of materials. Paul Davenport, one of the two presidents on the task force, kept bringing us back to the issue of quality in electronic journals. We found that, while peer review is problematic, it is currently the best way to ensure quality. We have to make sure that there will be as much rigor applied in electronic publishing as there is in other forms of publishing; this is a challenge with which we will all have to deal.

Recommendations

As I said before, we came up with 28 recommendations in total, which we then divided into eight categories, setting some aside for local action and some for national action. I will go through a few of them for you.

We had recommendations on raising awareness, implementing Best Practices and developing analytical tools.

• We have really urged groups such as AUCC, the Learned Society, and the Granting Councils to hold meetings on the subject of scholarly communication to start debating these issues.

• We have urged all of our member institutions to set up a Senate or other committee in order to look at the issues that are being addressed in the report.

• Library groups are being asked to communicate their Best Practice success stories and to publicly recognize the success of libraries in moving toward new models of information access and exchange.

• I mentioned the debates on statistics and performance measures and the CARL task force that is currently working in these areas. In conjunction with those, we are urging the federal government to consider an international symposium on scholarly communication in 1998.

There were a lot of recommendations concerning new technologies. There is a lot of concern about how people are accessing material; how to teach people to access productively; and then there is also the issue of equitable access, asking universities to ensure that no one discipline is disadvantaged as a result of the move towards technology.

The Canadian scholarly community is asked to explore the creation of a university-controlled site for the dissemination of Canadian scholarly information in electronic form. The former Executive Director of CARL is currently on a sabbatical working on this with Industry Canada, the federal department responsible for looking at the electronic journals program. We are hopeful that something will come out of it.

We have made many recommendations in our report on copyright. The only one that is applicable here is that AUCC and the Canadian Association of University Teachers, which is representative of all the faculty associations, will be meeting and opening discussions on the current copyright model.

Finally, the recommendations about renewing the academic reward system were the most difficult issues to address. How can universities, learned societies, and the Federal Research Granting Councils change their practices to ensure that they focus on the quality of publications and not the quantity of publications? And how can we get them to review their policies with respect to electronic journals and to consider these journals, if they are peer reviewed and adequate compensations are put in for quality, to treat them as equal to paper journals in the granting of applications, hiring, promotion, and tenure decisions?

This represents the range of recommendations that we have made. As I mentioned, we are hoping the report does not sit on the shelf. You will all be getting a copy, and we will be distributing it to all of the Canadian faculty members in the country.

Copyright � 1998 by Sally Brown