Eugene, Oregon
May 13-15, 1998
Betty Bengtson, Director of University Libraries
University of Washington
Good morning. It's my pleasure to welcome the final program session of our meeting. As you know, one of the major undertakings of ARL last year was the convening of a national roundtable on managing intellectual property, done in collaboration with the Association of American Universities (AAU) and the Pew Higher Education Roundtable.
The Roundtable builds on the partnership that ARL has developed with AAU and that advances our mutual interests. The Roundtable developed as a result of the presentation made by Greg Wegner, Associate Director of the University of Pennsylvania Institute for Research on Higher Education, at the October 1996 ARL Membership Meeting.
Greg reported on how the work of the Pew Campus Roundtables was helping to redefine higher education. Lunchtime conversation with Greg led to the notion of a national roundtable on issues related to intellectual property. Subsequent discussions with Robert Zemsky, Director of the Institute for Research on Higher Education, led to a commitment by ARL and Pew to proceed.
We were pleased that AAU was willing to partner with us on the event. We were also pleased that the Delmas Foundation and the Kellogg Foundation were willing to provide financial support. Funding was also provided by the Pew Charitable Trust, and Johns Hopkins University was the gracious host for the Roundtable meeting.
The fundamental goal of the Roundtable was to help move the community from discussion to action. The efforts of the library community to articulate the vast array of issues surrounding the increasing prices of scientific journals had begun to attract the attention of faculty, scholarly societies, university presses, and university administrators. Members of these groups were willing to understand the urgency of the problem and were willing to focus energy on the solution. The hope of the Roundtable, in the words of Bob Zemsky, was to move the discussion of these matters out of the library and into the domain of institutional and public policy, beyond description and into a strategic course.
The Roundtable is a facilitated discussion conducted over a day and a half. Twenty-eight members of the academic community, including presidents, chief academic officers, librarians, policy and legal experts, leaders of scholarly organizations, and heads of academic publishing centers, participated.
The event began with a dinner on November 13th, with that evening's goal being a crisp understanding of the issues, both economic and sociological. The focus of Friday's full-day session was strategies for change. Emanating from each Roundtable is a discussion paper that is published as an issue of Policy Perspectives, the publication of the Pew Higher Education Roundtable, which has a mailing list of over 20,000 university administrators and policy makers. Greg Wegner drafted the report of the November discussions, which was then shared with each of the participants for comment and clarification. A second draft was prepared and again shared with the group. The final report, "To Publish and Perish," was issued in the March 1998 issue of Policy Perspectives, and is available online at http://www.arl.org/scomm/pew/pewrept.html, or in PDF at http://www.irhe.upenn.edu/cgi-bin/pp-cat.pl#V7N4.
The real challenge of the Pew Roundtable is ahead. To be frank, this is not the first set of recommendations addressing the problems in scholarly communication that have been generated by and for this community. What we believe is different this time is the momentum of the broader community and the willingness to act. We must do all that we can to channel this energy into synergistic collaborative efforts. This morning's panel is an opportunity for us to deepen our understanding of the recommendations that have resulted from the Pew Roundtable and to explore specific actions that will move us forward.
To help us to accomplish this, we are pleased to welcome James Gardner, Vice-President and Provost at the University of Manitoba, and Peter Givler, Executive Director of the Association of American University Presses--both of whom were participants in the Roundtable discussions.
In addition, you have been given a document entitled "Advancing the Pew Roundtable Recommendations" (see http://www.arl.org/scomm/pew/recommend.html). It outlines the recommendations in the Policy Perspectives report and notes the activities that are currently under way. After the panel's presentations, we are eager to hear from you--not only your ideas for moving forward, but also how you are using the report on your campus.
In brief, the five recommendations made in the report are:
Let us now turn to our panelists to see what their views are on what will help the academic community to embrace and pursue these strategies. First James Gardner, the Vice-President and Provost at the University of Manitoba. Mr. Gardner has served as a member of AUCC, the Association of Universities and Colleges of Canada, and on the Canadian Association of Research Libraries joint Task Force on the Changing World of Scholarly Communication, which resulted in an excellent report by that same name (available online and in PDF at http://www.carl-abrc.ca/projects/scholarly/scholarly_task_force_eng.htm). Previously, he held academic appointments at the University of Iowa and the University of Waterloo. He is here today as a member of the Pew Roundtable.
Our next speaker is Peter Givler, the Executive Director of the Association of American University Presses. Prior to his service at the AAUP, he was the Director of the Ohio State University Press for ten years and served on the boards of the American Association of Publishers and the Association of American University Presses. Mr. Givler has also served as the Secretary General of the International Association of Scholarly Publishers.
Please welcome our speakers.