Eugene, Oregon
May 13-15, 1998
James Gardner, Vice-President and Provost
University of Manitoba
Thank you very much. It's a significant pleasure for me to come to Oregon and take part in this meeting.
There are a number of people in the room who were participants in the Pew Roundtable. They are probably better qualified than I am to summarize what went on, so what I'd like to focus on is a general overview of my opinions on some of these issues as an academic administrator, as a provost, and as the person who has to help the Director of Libraries at our university deal with the issues of acquiring the information, storing it, and disseminating it within our institution and within the immediate area of our institution.
I don't have a lot of personal credibility when it comes to some of the specific recommendations of the Roundtable report inculded in Policy Perspectives, "To Publish and Perish" (available online at http://www.arl.org/scomm/pew/pewrept.html and in PDF at http://www.irhe.upenn.edu/cgi-bin/pp-cat.pl#V7N4). I was just thinking that it was only two or three weeks ago that I signed away the copyright on the latest journal article I wrote. If you want to get published....
First, by way of introduction, I'd like to summarize what I see the problem as, although I think everyone in the room knows what the problem is. In general, it's the growing inability of the institutions in our society to provide access to scholarly and scientific information.
Two driving factors in this are, first, the enormous increase in the volume of materials, information, and perhaps of knowledge; and, second, the increasing costs of what I call legitimized sources of that information.
For universities in the U.S. and Canada, this problem strikes at the very heart of their mission. After all, any self-respecting university or college in the U.S. or Canada has as its goals the creation, preservation, and dissemination of knowledge. These institutions in North America and elsewhere, but particularly in North America and especially in the United States, have been hugely successful in creating new information, and, we have to assume, creating new knowledge to meet that particular part of their mission.
The problem for the institution is not specifically the research libraries that are part of these institutions; it's a fact that we have been increasingly unable to preserve, to store, and to disseminate the information that has been produced as part of our mission, and that that ability has eroded enormously over the last 20 years. The problem strikes at the very heart of public institutions and major private institutions of post-secondary education both in Canada and in the U.S., and, to some degree, in Europe. So our success has in many ways created a problem, and I think that's what the title "To Publish and Perish" is really all about.
The paradox in all of this is that the institutions pay either directly or indirectly for the production of information and new knowledge. And then they have to pay again to buy the legitimized packages of that knowledge and information that serve our research community of scholars, our educators, and the public alike. And, to rub salt into the wound, the institutions and the individuals that make them up cover some of the costs of the repackaging by serving as editors and manuscript reviewers and in other capacities that facilitate the publication of the materials in the scholarly journals and, indeed, in books, monographs, and other various forms.
So we really pay in three ways: We pay for the production, we pay in part for the repackaging, and we pay for the packages of information. Clearly, this is a problem that goes well beyond the research libraries themselves. Again, it strikes at the very heart of our mission as an institution of higher education.
My involvement in all of this really happened by accident. Some years ago I became Dean of Graduate Studies at the University of Waterloo and as part of that role I served as the Chair of the Senate Library Committee. Murry Sheppard spent a great deal of time telling me what I should be doing as chair of that committee. It introduced me to the problem, which really began to surface in the early 1980s and began to crescendo in the mid-1980s with the rising costs of journals, in particular. I've come to learn that the University of Waterloo, not having a medical school, was lucky, because at the University of Manitoba we do and we also have a law school and a dental school and all these professional groups and the cost of materials there are significantly greater than that of the engineering journals at Waterloo.
So my awareness of the issue began to grow at that time, and when I became a provost at the University of Manitoba in 1991, of course, it really came home to roost because somewhere we--myself and my colleagues in the president's office--had to find the resources to assist in the upkeep of at least the acquisitions part of the library. Then, as was mentioned, I served on the joint AUCC (Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada) and CARL (Canadian Association of Research Libraries) task force in 1995-96 that addressed the issue of scholarly communication, its changing nature, and some of the issues that you see articulated in the Policy Perspectives paper. Finally, I served on the Pew Roundtable last fall.
For the rest of my remarks, then, I'd like to focus on solutions. One of my areas of academic expertise is in disaster management--the management of natural hazards and disasters such as earthquakes, floods, tornadoes, and hurricanes. In that field, particularly on the management side, there's a triage-like approach to dealing with impact. Serving as provost, I've come to learn that that training has been particularly useful because I sit in my office and really sort things into piles: Those things that can't wait; those things that probably can wait a little bit; those things that can certainly wait; and those things that don't deserve waiting for. The solutions are all laid out in a different language in the Policy Perspectives paper. I break them down into really five groups of solutions: One, bear the costs; two, cut the costs; three, spread the costs; four, control the costs; and five, talk about it all. And this is basically what happens in disaster management, particularly in long-term planning. One way to spread the cost is, for example, in the United States, is to purchase flood insurance where that is available. That's just the way of spreading the costs of living in an area that you probably shouldn't be living in in the first place.
So, back to bearing the costs. What this means is just ratchet up your acquisitions and operating budgets to handle the increased volume and unit costs. Everybody's trying to do this in one way or another. That's been the principal mode of dealing with this problem over the last dozen years. I believe it will continue to be a factor in seeking solutions for the foreseeable future--after all, there are rewards for doing this. It's hard to find money, but, if you can, there are rewards, because it's this expenditure of the funds that really drive the performance indicators of organizations like ARL and others that rank institutions and their libraries in Canada and the U.S. in order to judge status. So long as there is a reward for libraries and for institutions to spend more money to either maintain or improve their acquisitions, or to increase their number of staff, then it will happen. So that issue is one that has to be addressed by organizations like this. And, of course, this is one organization over which the institutions have some influence, I would say, unlike totally independent organizations that rank libraries and colleges and universities in Canada and the United States. So the whole issue of performance indicators and how you measure quality, performance, and status will certainly cause institutions to continue to bear the costs as a solution to this problem.
The second area is "cut the costs." Well, most of us have been trying to do that, at least by selecting out certain things that we're no longer going to buy and perhaps choosing certain services that we're no longer going to provide. In other words, you just reduce the expenditures and acquisitions that are operating relative to cost increases.
Now, from the institutional perspective the problem with this is obvious. This is a backdoor approach to driving the institutional mission and how it's shaped, specifically, which programs will be supported and which aren't. And most of the cutting the costs solutions have been done with, I would say, not enough attention to the strategic directions of the individual institutions. It's a backdoor approach to reshaping the institutions. It's a realistic solution in the short term, but from the point of view of academic goals it's an undesirable approach to dealing with the problem.
Third, spread the costs. Here I think we're moving into some very positive territory. What I mean by spreading the costs is setting up various inter-institutional and perhaps inter-jurisdictional networking groups to share information sources. Sharing between jurisdictions is important in Canada, where the education is vested in the provinces and if you can create inter-jurisdictional sharing arrangements between the provinces, you get around some of the provincial parochialism and, indeed, widen access to the scientific and scholarly information significantly.
Of course, the option of spreading the costs is significantly facilitated by new information technologies, digitization of print material, and the like. However, this requires a real culture shift within and between institutions. It requires inter-institutional cooperation instead of competition. If we think back to some of the things I mentioned in the bearing the costs heap, there are some things there that really enhance competition and that don't enhance cooperation. So, though the new information technologies certainly facilitate spreading the costs through spreading access, the underside of this is the culture shift. You really have to look to cooperation as opposed to competition and the universities in Canada and the United States are highly competitive with one another in a variety of ways. This issue came up in the Pew Roundtable discussion at several points.
Fourth, control the costs. There are a lot of things that can be done here. There are many initiatives, including some that fit in the "spread the costs" category. For instance, I just mentioned the repatriation of ownership of intellectual property or copyright basically to the individuals and their institutions or professional scientific and scholarly societies. That's one mechanism we spend quite a lot of time talking about, but it's probably one of the more difficult mechanisms to set in place, certainly in any Canadian universities and likewise to some degree at most U.S. universities, because this, too, requires a shift in the academic culture and how people think about the process they go through of creating new knowledge or new information. Who owns it? Who has the right to sign over ownership?
For example, at the beginning of this discussion I mentioned that I just signed off on the copyright of an article. I have grown up in a culture that says I have that right to do it and that it's really none of my institution's business. However, when I move around to the other side of the desk and put on my administrator's hat and say, "Well, the institution does has something to say about this. After all, we provide a roof over your head, light and heat, pencils, paper, and maybe even computers," then I begin to reconsider whether it may in fact be very much my institution's business.
Secondly, what I mean by a change in the academic culture is that the academies in Canadian and U.S. institutions have been driven by the motto "More is better." You will recognize that this is congruous with and will apply to many things in our society. It has been a de facto rule--more publications is better--but, in fact, the culture has made it a de jure rule--how it measures success and achievement for such things as hiring, promotion, tenure, grant adjudication. All those processes and considerations have for three decades been driven by the notion that more publications are better, despite that fact there has been lip service to the notion of measuring quality. When it comes down to it, that measurement really hasn't happened. So there needs to be a significant shift in how we measure and assess achievement for a variety of practical purposes in the institutions.
Thirdly, within the "control the costs" category is the need to broaden the range of legitimized media for scholarly communication. In other words, how do we deal with the various forms of publication that appear via the Internet? Are there ways that we can legitimize this? We know there are ways that electronic publications have been legitimized through peer review, the normal means of the legitimization in the academic community.
For example, in some fields of mathematics it has for a long time not been the practice to publish in commercial journals. The good ideas, the new ideas, come out by the way of workshops and conferences and the rather loose proceedings that follow from those. And these are seen in that specific community as legitimate forms of expression. Now the whole academic community has to think about ways of broadening the range.
Finally, talk about the problem. The more this issue is talked about, the more the message gets through to the commercial publishers and the other people involved in the publishing industry. And there will be adjustments; after all, they want to stay in business.
By way of conclusion, I think the solutions will come about really as a result of it all: Bearing the costs, cutting the costs, spreading the costs, controlling the costs, and talking about it all. They are not mutually exclusive approaches and changes will result from the interactions between the various groups that are represented here. And time, of course, is the biggest ally we have.
Lastly, I would just like to mention that scientific and scholarly information, new knowledge, has been globalized for a long time. Globalization is not a new issue here. One of the things we have to remember in Canada, and in the United States as well, is the fact that a growing portion of material has resulted from research and scholarship that is being produced by people who are not in North America. They are in institutions elsewhere and who are not in universities but are members of research institutes, or are private scholars and researchers working for consulting firms or working in government. Thus, the issue is really quite beyond the total control of the institutions of higher education in any one part of the world.
In Canada we can talk about it all we want; in the U.S. we can talk about it all you want; we can talk about it together; but we have to keep in the back of our minds we don't control the issue entirely among ourselves. The academic and the scientific community worldwide does, and they are not all associated with the universities and the colleges and public education.
Thank you.