Albuquerque, NM
May 14 -16, 1997

Consortial Leadership: Cooperation in a Competitive Environment

APPENDIX I: BUSINESS MEETING

MS. WERNER: I’m pleased to convene this business meeting, and I want to begin, again in keeping with tradition, by saluting four of our colleagues who will be retiring as directors before we next meet in October. And those four are Ruth Patrick, Barbara Smith, Joanne Euster, and Frank Rogers.

In a moment, two of our colleagues will be telling us about Joanne and Frank. But I want to first say a few words about Ruth and Barbara, who could not join us here in Albuquerque. Ruth Patrick has been the Director of the University of British Columbia Library since 1990, and, as many of you will remember, she hosted last year’s very delightful meeting in Vancouver. Ruth will be taking a one-year leave of absence, following which she will be returning to the University of British Columbia.

Let me say a word or two about Barbara Smith. Barbara has served ARL with distinction since 1989, when she became Director of Libraries at the Smithsonian Institution, where she has been a dedicated proponent of ARL and its mission. Please join me in saluting Ruth Patrick and Barbara Smith.

I want to call now on Joe Boissé from the University of California at Santa Barbara, who will wish bon voyage to Joanne Euster, the University of California-Irvine’s University Librarian.

MR. BOISSÉ: Joanne and I really got to know each other about 14 years ago when we were in competition for the same job, and she subsequently went on to serve with distinction at Rutgers and at UC-Irvine. We have worked together in a number of venues: in this association, on the executive board of the Association of College and Research Libraries, on the board of directors of the Research Libraries Group, and, of course, as colleagues for the past several years in the University of California system. It has always been a pleasure to work with Joanne, a real delight. She is a colleague with whom you can disagree professionally, and it has no effect on your friendship. She is thoughtful, considerate, and always prepared to go the extra mile to make sure that things get done the way they’re supposed to be done. She has tackled some pretty enormous tasks in her leadership positions, in the professional associations as well as in the workplace. Now she is taking on another big challenge, retirement. Joanne has told me that her plans for the future are not definite, but they do include travel and writing.

Joanne, we all wish you a very wonderful retirement.

MS. WERNER: Phil Leinbach, would you be so kind as to tell us about Frank Rogers?

MR. LEINBACH: Thanks, Gloria. My friend Frank Rogers, from the University of Miami, asked that I make a few remarks on this sort of bittersweet occasion of retirement, and I am certainly pleased to do so.

Many of you know that Frank came to this country from England, and has served the profession now for 46 years, five of those in England and then 41 in this country. He’s from a little town called Darlington, which he says is the birthplace of railroads, and that’s about all it’s famous for. He went to the University of Durham and then to the library school at University College at University of London, where he received his degree in 1951. In 1955, Frank was elected to Fellow of The Library Association, which is quite an honor in Britain. He says he heard about the excellent opportunities for librarians in the United States from the dean of the University of Illinois graduate school when he was visiting the library school.

So, in the late ’50s Frank came over to this country, first to the Akron Public Library, but soon after, he moved to the University of Illinois library, where he spent a few years, and then he went to Penn State, where he worked as chief reference librarian and as Assistant Director for Public Services.

Frank received his first directorship in 1969, when he headed west to Portland State University in Oregon. He stayed there for a decade. He says it was there that he learned “how to maintain the development of a library in an environment of frequent budget cuts and hiring freezes.” Does that sound familiar? Frank then went to the University of Miami, from which he is retiring, in 1979, and where he has had a distinguished career.

Throughout his career, Frank has been active in library associations, particularly at the state and regional level. He served on the board of the Pennsylvania Library Association and was President of the Oregon Library Association. He has been particularly involved in ACURIL, the Association of Caribbean University Research and Institutional Libraries. He has been active in the Southeast Florida Library Information Network (SEFLIN), and in our own association, serving on the OMS Advisory Committee and the Committee on Statistics and Measurement.

Frank has published a number of articles and books, perhaps the most notable of which is the Guide to British Government Publications, which was published by Wilson in 1980.

There are a number of other things I could mention. Frank has given speeches and been on evaluation teams and consulting teams, those many contributions to the profession we do appreciate.

Let me say on the personal side that Frank has enjoyed camping, climbing, and mountaineering. In general, he has been a real outdoorsman. He is also a book collector and a student of postal history, mail carried across the Atlantic by 19th century steamships, a fascinating topic. I know from my own friendship with Frank that he is a lover of good food and wine, a love and ability many of us have enjoyed during dinners at ARL meetings, when we could always count on Frank for selecting the right wines for the meal.

Recently, members of the University of Miami community paid tribute to Frank. The president, Edward Foote, said that he noted from the time he came to the University that Frank displayed a great deal of intelligence, erudition, and qualities of leadership. Some other qualities that popped up in these tributes were a playful wit, quickness, energy, cooperation, vision, initiative, a fine colleague, and a quiet manner. So we do say hale and farewell to Frank today.

He tells me that he is officially stepping down on August 15, and will stay on at the University of Miami for a year doing some research, after which he will be happy to go to his home in Antigua, Guatemala, where we hope he will have many years of happy retirement. So thank you, Frank, and good luck.

President’s Report

MS. WERNER: As ARL President, it s now my pleasure to bring you up to speed on a number of recent Board actions. Let me begin by asking you for a vote on the Board’s very strong recommendation that we invite Texas Tech University to join our ranks as ARL’s 121st member. You will have noticed in the Board minutes that we have had an invitation to Texas Tech under consideration for a few years now. When we first began to consider them, though quantitatively and qualitatively they certainly met our criteria, there was a bit of concern about sustaining university investment in the library. I am pleased to say that over the course of the last several years, the trend line for investment by the campus administration in the library has been really quite remarkable, and we now feel very confident that they enjoy some very fine support at that institution.

So I am pleased to recommend to you that we invite Texas Tech to join our ranks. Before taking a vote on that issue, I would entertain any comments or questions from this group.

Hearing none, would all those in favor of this action signify by saying “aye”?

(Chorus of “ayes.”)

MS. WERNER: Any opposed?

(No response.)

The ayes carry it. I am sure that Texas Tech will enjoy hearing this outcome. Let me now report on several informational items. First off, we will be having some name changes within our committee structure. With considerable input from the ARL Management Committee, the Board has developed a new charge to that committee, and in the process of developing that charge, the committee members suggested a name change that we like very much. I’m pleased to report that henceforward, the ARL Management Committee will be known as the ARL Committee on Leadership and Management of Research Library Resources. The new name and the charge that really builds on that name highlight the leadership challenges we all face in a rapidly changing environment.

Secondly, I’m pleased to tell you that the board has taken action to cosponsor a new award with CAUSE and EDUCOM, the Paul Peters Award. This award will recognize distinguished achievement in networked information, and ARL, CAUSE, and EDUCOM have each appointed two members to serve on a steering committee to further define criteria for this award and to work out the process for choosing its recipients.

Marilyn Sharrow and Nancy Eaton are the ARL members on that steering committee, and I’m sure they would both be happy to hear any comments on criteria or suggestions for a recipient. The goal is to present the award for the first time in October.

The third item on the information front is that we have taken action on NINCH, the National Initiative for Networked Cultural Heritage. Max Anderson called attention to NINCH in his talk yesterday, particularly when he was referring to a move to digitize items in museums, and he acknowledged very beautifully how important the help of David Green, the executive director of NINCH, has been to the museum community.

It’s not clear to me how many of you are familiar with all of the work that David has managed to instigate during this first year of NINCH’s operation, but I am here to tell you it’s remarkable. ARL, with a very generous grant from the Delmas Foundation and a lot of help from David Stam, was able to participate in a policy role with the NINCH board during its first year. During that time several of us got sufficiently excited about what NINCH was planning to do that we joined from our own institutional base; I should tell you that the cost of a policy board membership, which is what ARL has, is $10,000 a year, whereas the institutional membership is $500, a considerable difference.

The NINCH board is very excited at the concept of allowing ARL to stay at the table in a policy role, but they also liked the idea of individual institutions joining as institutional members. It was a concept they thought they would like to carry forward to the art museum community, as well. I want to alert you that you will be receiving a letter cosigned by David Green and myself inviting you to consider institutional membership in NINCH. If any of you have any questions about their activities, those of us who have been following them would be delighted to answer them. Chuck Henry is very active with that group, and certainly he, Jim Neal, and I have enjoyed being institutional members.

Are there any questions about this initiative?

FROM THE FLOOR: How does the Board intend to maintain future ARL membership in NINCH?

MS. WERNER: We will be seeking institutional memberships from ARL libraries, and we will cumulate those and add to them if it becomes something we need to do to sustain the ARL membership at a policy level. It’s a new approach to funding memberships.

Another new initiative I want to tell you about is in the area of the scholarly community and intellectual property. ARL has had a number of discussions with the Pew people, which has resulted in a commitment for a national Pew Higher Education Roundtable on the management of intellectual property in higher education. We have had many discussions about this issue. Having had all of those discussions in a number of forums has paved the way so that the time is now right to have something done with the imprimatur of the Pew Roundtable attached to it. We aim to come out of this Roundtable with a direct and specific action agenda. The Roundtable will be held in November in the Baltimore/Washington, DC area, and we are told that 25 would be the ideal number of people to have there, made up of provosts, chancellors, and certainly some of our own members from this group. I would love for you to give some thought to this—your ideas as to what key individuals would be the right people to come together and come up with an agenda that we can move forward with. Also, as you know, the Pew Roundtable proceedings are published in Policy Perspectives and are widely read and considered both nationally and internationally.

I would like now to call on Jim Neal, Chair of the Working Group on Copyright Issues. He certainly has a few items to tell us about on that front.

Report of the Working Group on Copyright Issues

MR. NEAL (Johns Hopkins University): I am pleased to provide you with a brief report on several issues discussed and actions taken by the Working Group on Copyright Issues. We had our preliminary discussion of a new electronic copyright registration and management system that is in development at the Library of Congress. Two task forces have been formed; one is to work with LC to identify issues and concerns for discussion at our fall meeting, and a second is to draft for our review a set of ARL principles on copyright management information.

It’s important to note that copyright management systems are technologies that enable copyright owners to regulate and to charge for access to digital works. Clearly, in our view, legal and fair use of information and the privacy of individuals are potentially threatened by this type of technology. We need to be concerned.

I encourage you to read the summary that Prue Adler has prepared on legislative developments involving copyright [included as an attachment to the Federal Relations luncheon program proceedings]. WIPO treaty implementation legislation is now circulating in Washington, and from the reports we have received it does not look promising.

Two bills will probably be introduced later this summer providing additional protection for databases. It is probable, though, that the current copyright law will not be reopened again for several years, and therefore the Digital Future Coalition is now developing a legislative proposal to address our core issues in the area of fair use, preservation, interlibrary loan, distance education, and reproduction. We are trying to take not just a defensive tack, but to create a proactive legislative initiative.

Also, the copyright term extension legislation is now being discussed, but with prospectively an exemption for libraries, and as we have also heard, the Patent and Trademark Office reform legislation is calling for the creation of a new undersecretary position in the Department of Commerce, the executive branch that would be responsible for intellectual property policy, a very important development that we need to monitor carefully.

There is a draft set of principles for licensing electronic resources that is now being reviewed for finalization this summer, which I encourage you to read. This set of principles was developed by representatives of six national library associations and coordinated by ARL’s Mary Case. The Copyright Working Group did look the document over in tremendous detail and will be providing input before finalization this summer.

A very important development is the appearance of the Basic Principles for Managing Intellectual Property in the Digital Environment. Prepared by the National Humanities Alliance, it was reviewed by the Copyright Working Group and recommended for endorsement by the ARL Board. We will be bringing that recommendation to vote later today. These principles, which are important because they embrace the scholarly community of the humanities, build upon the work that was done at the University of California and on our own ARL principles.

We also discussed extensively the need for advocacy and public education on copyright. We outlined five strategies: 1) to continue to educate our own faculty and administrators on the issue; 2) to encourage understanding and actions in scholarly societies; 3) to publish information for public consumption in local newspapers and broadcast it on local radio stations—we will be developing model statements or core information that each of us can use in our local press and media; 4) providing library directors with information and overheads that we can use in our own campuses and communities; and 5) identifying key legislators in the new Congress and organizing our political network so we will be prepared this summer and fall to take the initiative and influence the legislation that will be coming down the pike.

We also began a discussion of the copyright status—or the public domain status—of outputs from federally funded research. For example, we will be looking at: guidelines from the National Institute of Health; the recent AAP position that papers posted by authors on the network would not be accepted for journal publication; concerns being raised by graduate students and publishers about the electronic distribution of dissertations; and recommendations that are included in the National Research Council report, Bits of Power.

Lastly, we discussed the status of CONFU guidelines. CONFU will be meeting next week to finalize its report. Most of the library community, and, we believe, the publishing community, are not supporting the proposed guidelines. The future of the CONFU process is not clear, but we feel that, instead of guidelines, the ARL community should now move ahead in the development and sharing of best practices—like the electronic reserve practices that were initially prepared with CONFU and are now being used at some of our institutions .

Yogi Berra, whose birthday was celebrated on Monday of this week, might say that the copyright developments provide us with an insurmountable opportunity. Let’s remain vigilant and aggressive. Thank you.

MS. WERNER: The work that this group does with respect to legislation and intellectual property is just phenomenal. Jim, you and your group deserve a hand.

MR. NEAL: The staff is absolutely phenomenal.

MS. BRYNTESON (University of Delaware): It has been my observation that there is quite a concerted effort at the institutional level to send letters to presidents, provosts, and others asking for endorsement of multimedia guidelines, and I wonder if you are aware of that and if there are any recommendations you might have on directors of libraries’ positions?

MR. NEAL: At some institutions there have been efforts to influence university administrations to actually take positions on the proposed guidelines; I know it is something we have done at Hopkins. The principal associations involved with some of the guidelines that are on the table have actually come out against them now, as well.

In addition, most of the library community, perhaps—the principal exception is the Special Libraries Association, and I encourage our colleagues who are active in that association to speak to that leadership—have taken a strong position against the guidelines. At Hopkins I have tried to bring this collective concern and opposition to the attention of our administration and also to those members of our faculty who are active in the scholarly societies that have an interest in these guidelines. It is an ongoing educational and agitation process.

Mary, do you have anything that you would add on that?

MS. JACKSON (ARL): There is a very concerted marketing effort to get the multimedia guidelines endorsed, and we need to be sharing our concerns regarding those guidelines to make sure the institution is aware of both sides of the issue, and of what is and isn’t included in the multimedia guidelines.

MR. NEAL: It was reported last week—and I don’t know if we have verification of this—that Bruce Lehman, Commissioner of Patents and Trademarks, reported, “The CONFU process looks broken.” So it seems that our concerns have been heard. Also, again, I’m not sure if the publishing community is in line with this.

MR. FRAZIER (University of Wisconsin): The history of guidelines speaks to the reality of photocopying guidelines that really came through the backdoor of our institutions. That is, they were promulgated and accepted at the departmental, divisional, and work-unit level, and gradually became the de facto policy of many, many universities by that route.

Now, we have had the CCUMC (Consortium of College and University Media Centers) sending out thousands of letters, and we have seen public information programs, video conferences which are, in fact, infomercials for the multimedia guidelines. So it’s very important now that our institutions have written statements that, at the very least, say that your institution has not endorsed the CONFU and the multimedia guidelines. We need to be wary of a kind of backdoor acceptance of the multimedia guidelines, guidelines which have a very powerful and negative effect on the way we use intellectual property within academia.

MS. NUTTER (North Carolina State University): It would be helpful to have a one-page ARL statement on board action related to CONFU that we could disseminate. It’s very difficult to know where and when this is going on.

MS. JACKSON: We have one on the Web at http://www.arl.org/info/frn/copy/fowler.html. It is ARL’s letter to CONFU expressing our non-endorsement of the guidelines, and it is accompanied by several one-page statements on our concerns with each of the proposed guidelines on e-reserves, distance learning, digital images, and multimedia.

MR. NEAL: Also, I did circulate over the directors’ list a letter that had been written by our provost. [Note: Some of the documents discussed during this part of the business meeting are included in the June 1997 issue of the ARL newsletter, ARL #192, a special issue on copyright and fair use in the digital environment.]

MS. WERNER: It is now time for our Executive Director’s report.

Report of the Executive Director

MR. WEBSTER: Thank you. I would like to start with a very important and joyful announcement. The Coalition for Networked Information, as of 3:30 yesterday afternoon, formally announced the appointment of a new executive director. Clifford Lynch has agreed to be the Coalition’s new executive director, a tremendous occasion.

Clifford is uniquely suited to do this job. He is a brilliant strategist, he really knows information technology, but, perhaps most important, he understands and endorses libraries. He is an advocate of the values that we represent. He has, of course, had a longstanding relationship with Paul Peters and with all of us at the Coalition, and he really comes as an intimate friend and expert who is uniquely prepared to move the Coalition into its next phase. We are absolutely delighted with this development, because with Clifford we will continue to have the intellectual leadership that we need in order to influence and shape the future of networking and of networked information.

The announcement has been posted on the Net, but I would like to read the quote from Clifford that is in that announcement—it captures him so effectively; he is a very articulate person—“It’s a great honor to be able to build on the work that my friend and colleague, Paul Peters, has done on behalf of our whole community and to be able to lead CNI into the 21st century. My belief is that CNI is the most important program that we have to chart the course for the development and exploitation of the possibility of networked information to serve scholarship. As a community, we face enormous, but often confusing, opportunities that can be addressed only by working together on a national and international basis. And I will work to ensure that CNI continues to be a powerful vehicle for sorting through the confusion, fostering dialogue, and engaging in the opportunities before us.” I am thrilled that he is going to be a continuing part of the Coalition’s development. Needless to say, it is a great relief after the tragedy of Paul’s death to know that Clifford will be working with us.

To move on, I would like to review some of the personnel changes that have been taking place at ARL. As you know, we have been rebuilding the team over the last year, and we have been very fortunate to make appointments that strengthen and extend our talented group. The first person I want to have you welcome is DeEtta Jones, our new Diversity Program Officer.

I hope you have had a chance to meet and talk with DeEtta. She is a great source of energy and insight into the issues that we face in the diversity arena. She comes to us most recently from the City of Fort Collins and Colorado State University environments, and she has been working very closely with the diversity committee as well as with the Office of Management Services and the management committee to put together the new diversity program.

I also want to welcome Julia Blixrud, who has joined us as Senior Program Officer. Julia is familiar to all of us. She has worked at a number of our institutions, and used to work for ARL back in the CONSER A&I Project days. She will be helping us out during Martha Kyrillidou’s absence. As most of you know, Martha returns to Greece next month to complete a two-year obligation that she accepted when she took the State Department Fulbright grant to come here for her education. Martha will be returning to ARL at the end of those two years. Julia is picking up the Statistics and Measurements portfolio and is also working in the Publications arena.

I also want to acknowledge that Kathryn Deiss was promoted to Senior Program Officer in the Office of Management Services, a reflection of her growing contributions to that program.

Finally, I would like to be point out that Glen Zimmerman, upon his retirement at a young age from the Library of Congress, has agreed to come over to the Association to work on a part-time basis as a Senior Program Officer, principally working with Deborah Jakubs in the Global Resources Program. Glen’s joining us gives us an excellent opportunity to extend our connections with the Library of Congress and to work in particular with the overseas field offices that Glen has overseen at LC.

I would like to also underscore the availability a new communications tool: the ARL Program Plan for the year. This, put out for the first time in 1997, is a combination of an annual report, which reviews what we have done over the course of the last year, but, very importantly, also says where we are going with our programs and activities, what the staff and our committees are working on. It’s a comprehensive statement at the outset of the year.

I know it is heavy reading, but I do hope you see it as a reference tool, an item that you can refer to when you have questions, something that you can dip into to determine where we are with a particular program and where we plan to go. Further, the Program Plan is a useful way for people new to the Association to determine where they want to invest their time and energy. Then, of course, our monthly E-news will update and extend the Program Plan.

The one other thing I want to briefly comment on is the Association’s financial situation. The Board has encouraged me also to provide this information in an article in the newsletter, so the charts on the transparencies that I will use will be available to you in that publication. [Note: See ARL #193, August 1997, for a report on the Association’s finances.]

The auditor’s report for 1996 indicates that our total revenue for this past year was roughly $3,123,000. The base amount for that revenue is the ARL membership dues: it is over half of our budget revenue.

We began 1996 with an expectation that we would have a deficit for the year because of our investment in the copyright arena. We ended the year with a reduction in the fund balance of $12,000, which is about half of what we had budgeted for the year’s deficit, so, overall, we did meet our goals for the year. We are in sound financial situation.

We continue to build the board’s reserve. We contributed $60,000 to the board permanent reserve, and along with $25,000 in interest earned on that reserve during the year, have built the reserve to a level of almost $500,000. Are there questions on the financial situations that we face?

MS. ALEXANDER (University of Missouri): Duane, what is our goal in terms of the reserve?

MR. WEBSTER: The intent is to reach $1 million, and then use the income from that reserve to support specific project activities that would be identified by the Board as deserving our investment. The Board’s intent is to provide us with a venture fund that will allow us to invest in new ideas, new directions, and new initiatives. We have been very careful to nurture that fund over the last seven years, and we expect that we’ll have reached that goal within another four years. The movement has been very promising. The fund balance itself is at roughly $300,000, and though it declined this year by $12,000, it has been relatively stable over the last several years, and it is earning interest, as well.

In closing, I hope you have a sense that we are very much committed to leveraging the influence and presence that this Association has on the set of issues that we’re facing, and grow on that by building coalitions and partnerships with a large number of different organizations, both administrative and scholarly groups such as AAU and NINCH.

We have worked very hard to do just that in the legislative arena by working with coalitions such as the Digital Future Coalition and the Shared Legal Capability. All of these efforts allow us as a community to have a larger voice within the context in which we are working, but it also gives us a very special opportunity to exercise influence on those communities and to acquaint them with the issues and our points of view in a very effective fashion.

Thank you.

MS. WERNER: This is a time that we have set aside to entertain any issues for discussion amongst the representatives from our member institutions. Are there any issues that you would like to have brought up in this forum?

MR. HEWITT (University of North Carolina): This isn’t an issue, but I have an announcement for those of you who hold institutional membership in IFLA. ARL has nominated Marianne Scott for the IFLA presidency, and we need your support. These are hotly contested, highly political elections, and most importantly, those of you who are not going to Copenhagen this summer for the IFLA conference, send your proxies to Duane.

MS. WERNER: Yes. That is an important thing for us to know about.

MR. FRAZIER (University of Wisconsin): Some of you may know that we have been contemplating the issue of journal prices at my institution to the point where we have gone public with some thoughts from Ken Rouse, our chemistry librarian. The question I keep finding myself returning to is, What are we really going to do to address this issue? I would like to suggest that we need to develop a fund in order to create new publication models. There is just no way around it. If 100 institutions would put up $10,000 each to fund 10 start-up electronic journals that would compete head to head with the most expensive scientific and technical journals to which we subscribe, we would have $100,000 annually for each one of those 10 start-up titles. This amount of money, by the way, is smaller than the annual increase that we are now experiencing for the most expensive journal lists to which we subscribe. Such an endeavor would cost less than the price for these subscriptions per year.

My question is, do we have 100 institutions prepared to put some fairly serious money on the table in order to create new models for scholarly communication? I don’t see any way around the reality that we have to put the money out in order to make this start to happen.

MS. WERNER: Ken, do you sense, in your own institution, that if we were to move in this direction, that your faculty and other key players would be behind this effort and would transfer their publishing to these new modes?

MR. FRAZIER: In all honestly, I believe the response would be mixed.

MS. CRETH (University of Iowa): I applaud Ken’s idea. I do think, though, that the reality is we would have to give serious thought about possible scholarly societies or associations to partner with. The real problem is that librarians cannot start refereed journals in any field but our own, which won’t help the problem, and so we need to find faculty who are prepared to take on such a task, and they would have to be senior faculty in order to attract other faculty members to contribute. Within our institutions—I would imagine this is true for all of them—there is still a lot of discussion about credit for tenure and for promotion with electronic materials. So it’s risky in a lot of regards. Faculty from one of the medical departments and from the medical library met with me a year and a half ago. They wanted to start a new journal, challenging the editors of journals in that particular field. I asked them, “How are you going to do this? Who will back you? Is there an association that will put their imprint on this?” They were young faculty who wanted to take this on, but we’ve not heard back from them. I think the problem is they still have to find an association. So, if we’re going to proceed in this direction—and it’s a challenge for us to think about putting our money where our mouth is—we will have to find some partners in order to move forward. They are probably out there, but it is something we certainly need to give serious thought to. I would suggest the AAU as a possible partner.

MS. TAYLOR (Brown University): I wish to support Sheila’s statement. Our provost is very interested in these issues, and earlier in the year he made a proposal to the faculty that, if there were any member of the Brown faculty who was in a position, from being on an editorial board of a journal, to move that journal from the commercial publisher to Brown, that Brown would take over the expense of publishing that journal. Now, I’m not sure that my provost had thoroughly considered the implications of the statement when he said it, nonetheless, it was a very bold step. The sad thing is that he has had no takers. One individual come forward with a proposal to publish monographs electronically, which was an interesting idea, but not quite what our provost was after. So we do have the will and the spirit out there in some institutions. We have been known to put up money before, to go after windmills when necessary. But we do need some sort of incentive to get faculty to really buy into this and take the risk.

MR. GHERMAN (Vanderbilt University): I applaud Ken’s idea. I think we need a lot more thought put into this. For instance, we need to be looking for partners, and our university presidents may be another place to pay attention to.

Ken, I assume when you say we’re going to go head to head, that we would also cancel those journals from those publishers that we’re building a journal to compete with. That is another power we have. When we create this journal, we’re canceling the commercial journals. There is a double line here.

I have been talking with some people on this issue, though, and maybe there is another path here. As an example, for the physics literature it is initially published electronically in the physics archives with no peer review. Then when it is taken down it is turned into the paper article that we, then, buy in the journal. Maybe our money ought to go to the physicists to say, “Can we carry this model further? Can we bring the review process to the physics archive?” Then can we take that next step to say, “Now let’s not take it down off that server and let’s not buy it, but look at it there.” There needs to be a new model we could look at, not only in physics, and put money into moving that forward. I applaud Ken and agree: we need to take some steps to do something. I’m just not sure where.

MS. WERNER: I want to see if I can capture the feeling here. I think Ken’s idea is one of a number of ideas, and I feel that there is a real sense of frustration that we talk about these issues a lot, but can’t seem to put together a package that we can move toward with.

MR. CAMPBELL (University of Southern California): You know, there is a song called, “Let’s do something even if it’s wrong.” I like that suggestion. I want to suggest another potential alternative. It might cost us more, but why don’t we buy UMI, rather than allowing them to buy UMI? I’m not sure it wouldn’t be worth what it would cost us to bid on that.

MS. WERNER: Do you know what price tag we’re talking about?

MR. CAMPBELL: I have no idea, but I can think of what the price tag would be if Elsevier buys it.

MS. WERNER: Any other issues or comments?

(No response.)

Then I call this meeting to a close. Thank you.