Washington, D.C.
October 14-16, 1998

Confronting the Challenges of the Digital Era

Provosts' Panel

Transforming Scholarly Communication
Convened by Jim Neal, ARL President

Good morning. We turn our attention this morning to the challenges of scholarly communication and strategies for research library and university leaders to join forces to foster understanding and bring about a central change.

Last year, ARL and AAU hosted a meeting at Johns Hopkins. University presidents, provosts, librarians, publishers and researchers met under the aegis of the Pew Higher Education Roundtable. We met to discuss this crisis in scholarly communication, and several key issues were identified as a result of that meeting and captured in the report “To Publish and Perish.” We confronted the issue of the imbalance in information price relative to value and source costs. We discussed the time lag between authorship, peer review, publication and dissemination, as well as the imbalance of information authorship, ownership and proprietary rights. Perhaps most importantly, the Roundtable discussed the under-recognition of these conditions as important public policy issues. Several important conclusions were reached. What has for decades been discussed as a library problem must now be embraced as a concern of the entire university and scholarly communities as a whole.

We must move away from what we call the gift exchange society that we have created. The corporate economy that has replaced a guild economy now encourages our faculty researchers to give away their intellectual property, while libraries at our universities buy it back at ever increasing prices. This is particularly problematic when so much of this research is being funded with public dollars through federal grants.

We are choking on the proliferation of publication and must find ways to focus increasingly on the quality and less on the volume of faculty output. Libraries must come together to more intelligently and collaboratively negotiate the purchase and licensing of scholarly publications. We face a very dysfunctional market where an expensive good at the institutional level is celebrated as a free good at the user level.

We must rethink the matter of intellectual property and the absence of financial interest for many universities in the retention of rights for use of publications produced by their own faculties. We must explore the location of quality marking and ways to separate publication from faculty communication and assessment. And finally, we must invest in new electronic scholarly publishing strategies. This is, clearly, a comprehensive agenda.

We are fortunate to have with us today two influential academic leaders who participated in the Pew Roundtable. They will assess the issues that I’ve outlined from the perspective of the research university provost. We will move to discussion after both speakers have finished their presentations but welcome any clarifying questions that you might have after the first speaker.

Our first speaker is Dr. David Shulenburger. He is Provost at the University of Kansas. His research and teaching areas are business economics and labor relations. Dr. Shulenburger has published extensively in these fields, and I’m told he teaches at least once a year and is the recipient of many campus awards. He speaks and advocates nationally on scholarly communication matters. He has recently spoken and worked with the University of Kansas Board of Regents and the Big 12 Provost. He has an impressive connection to the ARL community, having received his Ph.D. from Illinois and as a tuition-paying parent at Kansas, Northwestern, and MIT.

Our second speaker is Dr. Charles Phelps, Provost at the University of Rochester. Dr. Phelps has served as Director of Rand Corporation's program on regulatory policies and institutions, he was Director of the Public Policy Analysis program at Rochester and chair of the Department of Community and Preventive Medicine in the School of Medicine and Dentistry. He has been associated with three professional journals and served for three years as a trustee for the Society for Medical Decisionmaking.

Dr. Phelps has published extensively, including his textbook, Health Economics. He is a member of AAU's Committee on Digital Technology and Intellectual Property Rights, and this past June provided congressional testimony on the WIPO Treaty legislation. Dr. Phelps has also been a strong proponent of the decoupling proposal. Please welcome our speakers.