Eugene, Oregon
May 13-15, 1998
MS. BENGTSON (University of Washington): Thanks to both of our speakers this morning for stimulating our thinking about the Pew Roundtable report and its recommendations. The point Peter made about involving faculty in the discussion leads us naturally to begin our discussion now.
I'm very interested to know how the report is being used, and how you plan to use it, to involve the faculty, administrators, and others on your campus in the discussion. So the floor is open for comments and discussion.
MR. BENNETT (Yale University): Just two weeks ago I was presented with a copyright form and it was a great pleasure to line out what was proposed and to send in alternative language that allowed the publisher to do its business and allowed me to retain ownership of the copyright. That felt wonderful. Very empowering. It even felt more wonderful when the publisher sent back a message saying the changes were fine.
I want you to know that the publisher was the University of California Press. Not only can it happen, it can happen at university presses. It's that press that deserves applause here and prompts this question to Peter: Will the AAUP take leadership in changing the behavior of presses that automatically ask us to surrender our copyright? Is it too much to hope that the university presses will join ARL? Or that they will join faculty in breaking this bad and addictive habit?
MR. GIVLER: I think so. I can think of several other presses that I happen to know are pretty flexible in the rights that they are willing to contract for and the ones that they're willing to leave with authors. As a matter of fact, most university presses are willing to be flexible. The problem is that we're still publishers. It may vary from publisher to publisher, but at some point every publisher will say, No, we can't go any further on this because we have to recover our investment in the costs of publication and if we give away rights beyond a certain point, wherever that point is, then the ability to recapture that investment is gone.
For the university presses, this is not a question of greater or lesser profits. It's a simple question of survival. If we can't recover costs, if we don't have enough control over copyright to cover that investment, well, we are just out of business altogether.
But regarding the general question, Scott, about AAUP and its role in this, there have been a number of discussions about it. The Association itself can't take the role of trying to dictate terms to its members about what's appropriate and what isn't. But the discussion does go on all the time. In general, I believe, the membership is willing to take a flexible view, so, for those of you who are publishing, if you see a contract that looks to you like you're being asked to give away the farm, negotiate. Ask, and see what you can get.
MS. HITCHCOCK (University of Texas Press): We have actually been agreeing with all of this. I worked at Princeton University when we were asked if the copyright could remain in the author's name. I've never had a problem with that. But there is a misunderstanding about what that means.
The copyright notice on the copyright page of the book doesn't mean very much. It is the contract you have with your publisher whereby you turn over certain rights or hold back certain rights that is the important document. If you turn over all your rights to the publisher, the copyright notice can be in your name, but it is meaningless.
So you should be more concerned not with whose name the copyright is in but the actual rights that you hold back or give to the publisher, and I think you will find we are willing to negotiate about that. It is not a mystique about having the copyright in my name or in Susan's name; it is who owns the actual rights.
MS. MOBLEY (Purdue University): Betty, you asked about some of the things we were doing and how we utilize the document. I must say I wish the document had been on my desk three months ago. It would have been enormously helpful. But it will still be helpful this fall because I recently kept a similar document from being killed in our university Senate.
At Purdue I have certainly been working with the faculty for a number of years, of course, on matters surrounding the price of the scientific publications, and I'd say my faculty in the sciences are well up to date with the issues. Eighteen months ago, in the last ad hoc report where recommendations were made, this whole issue appeared in terms of tenure, and a central point was changing the fundamental culture of scholarly communication. The university library committee moved to a document that was similar--we have Ken Frazier to thank for providing us with a Wisconsin document which we put into Purdue terms. We left in a recommendation about tenure and sent it forward.
It took a year for the university library committee to work it through. We then sent it to the university resources policy committee. That is where we hit some of the faculty criticisms, albeit interesting ones, and what we found is that the junior faculty members are very open to these changes, whereas the luddites, the older senior faculty, were concerned about the issues of withholding copyrights because of the feeling that junior faculty would be unduly impacted for tenure by doing this.
If I had had a document like the Pew report then, I would have given it to them. In any case, we were able to say to that committee that our purpose was to have a campus-wide discussion of all the issues.
Ultimately, they accepted our first recommendation, the establishment of a campus-wide committee to look at copyright issues, but none of the others were voted on. At least it's still on the table of the Senate.
So, over the summer I will seek permission to make the Pew document the focal point for the balance of that discussion.
MS. BENGTSON: Terrific. Thanks, Emily. Certainly Purdue has been leading the way for many of the fronts in your discussions with your faculty.
MR. NEAL (Johns Hopkins University): I wanted to communicate some things from Johns Hopkins; first, a document was distributed and discussed with all the department chairs in engineering and arts and sciences, as well as with the faculty advisory committee. One interesting theme came out of the discussions that I think would be useful to share.
It was important actually in all five areas that were recommended by the Pew Roundtable report, but there seemed to be a clear focus on items two and four (be smart shoppers and invest in electronic forms of scholarly communication, respectively), which I interpreted as a continuation of the "it's the library's problem" issue, because those are the two points that were seen as outside of the immediate area of responsibility and influence.
Another important theme that came up in the conversation was the idea that this is not really an issue. This is not really a problem. Instead, it's the failure of the university administration to allocate the money to buy the things to add to the collections. Another important and obvious area of concern they articulated was that the faculty subsidization needs to take place, and the universities better recognize that.
The other group we distributed this to and discussed it with was the library's national Visiting Committee. About half of them were very supportive of the ideas being advanced and wanted to find ways they could in fact help assist from their perches outside the university. The other half were somewhat cynical and critical. When I tested the common characteristic that was among that latter group, I found that many of them were in fact invested as stockholders in large media and publishing companies, so that is something we need to be sensitive to, as well.
MR. VAUGHN (Association of American Universities): Let me just mention a few reactions to the comments this morning and some of the things AAU anticipates doing. First of all, I think the view is generally that several activities have to go on simultaneously. I believe that the report captured these simultaneously in the five recommendations.
Peter has given us a sober warning that these are really difficult changes to try to effect. One essential thing is the need for the collective action. Some of these proposals, if we are going to make and implement changes, no institution or discipline can get out on its own.
The challenge is to coordinate the action so sufficient critical mass moves forward together and nobody feels isolated--this is critical. Bringing in the faculty is absolutely essential. I mentioned an illustration at the Pew conference and let me bring it up here: At least within the AAU sphere, there are few issues that are stronger hearty perrenials or more fraught with the possibility of conflict than indirect costs.
Back in the mid '80s this was escalating federal policy to the point where, on a national level, we had faculty groups almost working in league with federal policy-makers in Congress and the federal agencies leveled against universities, who were posed as the "bad guys." Federal policy-makers believed that universities were using indirect costs in ways that were taking money away from the faculty. They didn't like the indirect costs; they thought it was robbing the faculty.
So we started an education campaign working with the AAU presidents to encourage them to have organized conversations on campus. It wasn't as systematic as we would like, but it occurred to a great enough extent. So now on a national level we really talk with faculty. They understand that the role of indirect costs is a central part of the research that they do on campus. That is part of what we need to try to effect on this issue.
But, as Peter has mentioned, although indirect costs may be a crucial issue in research, when you're talking about tenure and promotion, you are talking about the most fundamental aspect of a career. If we launch this sort of campaign and the faculty see it as a national organization of campus administrators playing with their future in ways in which they are not engaged, we will have trouble.
We need, then, to do both: From the top-down by working with national organizations, faculty, scholarly societies, and the academies; and from the bottom-up on campuses. I talked about ways we might get an organized education campaign--that is part of what we need to do here.
The AAU has a committee on digital networks that is discussing the Pew report. Because we got into an extraordinarily convoluted discussion of copyright legislation, as you can well imagine, we didn't get as much time on the Pew report, per se. But we talked about the accompanying proposal that is going forward. That task force will be meeting with some society publishers and representatives in June.
Thanks to Jim Neal's heroic efforts, we did get the AAU committee and the next day the entire AAU membership to endorse the concept of SPARC. The university presidents are conservative by nature, so we endorsed the concept.
There was an explicit discussion about the relationship between SPARC and the decoupling proposal originally articulated by Chuck Phelps and included in the Pew report. It goes back to Harold Billing's comment that SPARC was too conservative and he wanted to see more vision. Peter alluded to the fact that the decoupling proposal may be more visionary and therefore more complicated. We need to do both simultaneously--the decoupling effort and the SPARC effort compliment each other well. It is very important that both of those go forward, because those are efforts that start turning this challenge into some concrete activities that we can then discuss with the faculty on campus in a more specific way.
But I want to go back to this notion that the challenge for AAU and ARL is to try to figure out ways to have organized discussions that will bring in the faculty so that they become part of the solution and effect some substantial change. Trying to do that in a coordinated way is really the challenge here. To bring this down to a mundane level: Way back in the early '80s there was an effort by a group of presidents that focused on intercollegiate athletics because the scandals were getting out of control. There was a clear recognition by the university presidents that athletic directors and the coaches were running the NCAA in such a way that there was a complete disconnection with the policy and a total non-communication between the university presidents and the athletic directors and so on.
It took about a decade--and obviously there is a still a lot of difficulty--but the presidents now are embedded in the NCAA in a way they weren't in the early '80s. There is a president's commission. Presidents do more than just attend the annual conferences of the NCAA, they keep track of what the athletic directors are doing--there is a coordinated relationship.
So change at a national level can occur. Rather than simply engaging the faculty, we need both top-down and bottom-up efforts.
MS. NUTTER (North Carolina State University): I thought I would give an example of discussion in a multi-campus environment. Next week is the Triangle Research Libraries Network governing board meeting. We will have two hours of provost attention from Duke University, North Carolina, and North Carolina State. We will be discussing the Pew report. A faculty member will lead that part of that discussion; he is really passionately committed to the issue and is very informed and is also excited about SPARC.
One of the things that I think may come out of this meeting and one of the reasons we have taken this direction is that our provosts have a great interest in the copyright of multimedia products, because they have been reminded by the information technology people that money can be made from multimedia products, and so I think we will see a copyright agenda move in that area. That's something we must get involved in and we are really likely to get left out of if we don't have a sense of what is happening on our campus and step in.
Now, our provost asked the communication subcommittee and the university library committee to take on the copyright ownership issue, with a charge that would have involved taking away a lot of rights from the faculty. Our committee very wisely said they would help with the development of the charge and the membership, but won't do it themselves because they don't want to tie the library to any kinds of changes that will alienate the faculty. I think that ultimately has an effect on pricing publications at the university, so that's an issue we should follow too. I want to make one comment on John Vaughn's mention about the NCAA efforts that the presidents undertook. In that case, there really were some champions for that issue. I think we need to find a champion, a leader within the president's group, who might take on this issue for us and have it become his or her issue. We may see more success if we have that.
MS. BENGTSON: Those are excellent points, Susan. We need to remember that not only is our university a consumer of the intellectual property but it is an owner of the intellectual property and increasingly interested in the income from that. Certainly we have seen it with patents, but there are more and more discussions about copyrighted material, as well.
MS. EATON (Pennsylvania State University): I'd like to describe some bottom-up efforts to complement John Vaughn's comments. We had a series of activities at Penn State this year that I hope will follow on with the new activities next year.
Graham Spanier, President of PSU, spoke on the topic. He used his presidential time to do a fairly impassioned presentation using some of the ARL material. This was followed by two information sessions led by the university library committee and the research committee. The Penn State Press comes under the research committee.
We also put on a panel discussion where I, the head of the Penn State Press, and a junior faculty member spoke from the point of view of somebody who had not yet attained tenure and who was receiving conflicting advice from his own department and from the committee.
I will clearly use the new piece, the Pew report, in follow-up presentations. But what we hope will come out of our work in the fall is a joint task force with membership from the library committee, the research committee, and the tenure committee to start looking at the Pew report's fifth recommendation: How to decouple publication from evaluation of the faculty and what would have to happen within the different disciplines to make that a reality.
MS. BENGTSON: Those are all wonderful ideas and suggestions for activities. Nancy, it sounds as though having attention at the top as well as attention in a number of faculty committees--not just the library committee--is something that we all might think about.
MR. JOHNSON (Oklahoma State University): We do have a champion--the provost of the University of Kansas, Dave Shulenburger. I want to publicly acknowledge his efforts on our behalf.
I would also like to make an observation on a point raised earlier. It seems to me very ironic that we are supposed to be ending our preoccupation with numbers and at the very same time publishing the ARL membership criteria index. Is it not time for us to reexamine the purpose and utility of that index? If we expect the rest of the higher education community to end its preoccupation with numbers, shouldn't we be doing as we say and not as we do?
MS. BENGTSON: I know the Statistics and Measurement Committee has struggled with this for years now. It is an issue that we all recognize the Association needs to look at.
MR. NEAL: I would like to return to the decoupling issue. Something that is a frustration and yet one of the strengths of being a faculty member is the divided loyalties--as an administrator, one sees this all the time. As a faculty member, you experience it.
Typically, institutions can assist and involve the faculty in institutional policy and procedure development and in shifting the institutional culture. But the other loyalty a faculty person has is to that person's discipline, sub-discipline, or subject area grouping. The relative strength of these loyalties ebb and flow. Many faculty members will say, I'm unappreciated here on campus; I have to go to the national or international meeting to feel appreciated. That tells one something.
Back to the decoupling issue. The institutions, whether coordinated or uncoordinated, can to some degree steer policies and procedures for promotion, tenure, and hiring. How do you measure achievement alike? But if this is at odds with what is happening in the individual areas or discipline areas, it will have relatively little effect. Certainly, young faculty members in fields that require research funds respond very directly to the culture of that particular discipline. If that culture says they have to spew out dozens of short articles every year in an international journal, they will do it, despite what the university says is appropriate for tenure and promotion.
So that's just a little hitch in the whole thing. Perhaps eventually, however, these two cultures and the two loyalties can come together on this. I certainly hope they can.
MS. BENGTSON: Thank you, Jim. Are there other comments from the floor? Other issues that anyone wishes to raise?
UNIDENTIFIED: When we are talking about the other groups on our campus who want to get involved, I wonder if it might help to broaden the definition of scholarly communication a bit. The report talks about the communication from scholar to scholar. Actually, however, what a lot of scholars are not doing is communicating with students, with intelligent members of the general public, and with scholars in other disciplines. This outreach function seems important at a time when the universities are called upon to justify their role in service to the community. There is pressure on them--particularly on state universities--from the legislatures to do that kind of public outreach. Might we perhaps include some mention of the scholarship that reaches beyond the academy and not just the scholarship that goes from scholar to scholar?
MR. VAUGHN: The AAU chief academic officers will be meeting this September, and will have a major session on scholarly communication and all the issues that we have been discussing this morning. Betty Bengtson and I talked about finding ways to inform all of you about that session as it develops so that you can speak with your chief academic officers on campus and raise these issues. Doing so will obviously make this kind of discussion richer, and more individual provosts will come to that meeting knowing the issues from their own campus' perspective.
I will speak with Duane Webster about how we can keep you informed on the planning of the session as it develops. As Jim Neal indicated, the chief academic officers as well as the provosts have to get engaged in this, and more of them are aware of that. Dave Shulenburger, the aforementioned University of Kansas provost, is also part of the planning committee.
We have a real opportunity at the meeting to try to broadly engage the chief academic officers as a group on this action.
MS. BENGTSON: Thanks for that reminder. Anything we can do to prep our provost before that September meeting on the issues and the reports might be helpful.
There have been some good suggestions coming from this discussion. Clearly, there are areas where the library and librarians can take a lead. There are other areas where faculty or administrators need to take a lead and we need to persuade them to do that. I would just hope we can continue sharing what is going on on each campus and what have been effective suggestions. We can all benefit from each other's experiences, so please do continue keeping each and all of us informed about how these issues are being addressed on your campus.
Thank you.