Washington, D.C.
October 14-16, 1998
MR. NEAL: I think we’ve been presented with some very, very provocative ideas on how to address the issues that we’ve been talking about for many years in the area of scholarly communication. We’re very interested in your reactions, your comments, and your questions.
MS. BAKER (Washington University): As librarians, we’ve been following your work for several years now and I believe there’s an effect that you may not be aware of. Provosts thinking about these issues and talking about them among yourselves has changed the quality of our meetings with our provosts. We’ve gone from the eyes glazing over when we bring up this topic to lively interest, people pulling your papers out of their briefcases and saying, “Let’s talk.” Thank you.
(Applause.)
MR. JOHNSON (SPARC): I’d like to applaud Dr. Shulenburger’s advocacy of NEAR and proposals like that which I think are consistent with the kind of outcomes that SPARC was established to advocate in perhaps a different fashion. But certainly there’s a common outcome that we’re all seeking.
You indicated that you felt faculty would support an approach such as NEAR. How do you see societies responding to this type of proposal, and what kind of role do you see for them in the new world that would be shaped by the outcome of this idea?
DR. SHULENBURGER: Once upon a time, I viewed societies as being the heroes, and I felt the solution was simply to keep societies from selling their journals. But as I watch the behavior of societies, I see they are beginning to exploit the value of that scholarship themselves. And there’s quite an irony in it.
These societies were established to spread scholarship. If they fall into the same mode of raising prices and supporting their infrastructure through selling journals, they become the enemies of the spread of scholarship. There’s always a difference between the leadership and the membership. I think the membership of societies, the faculty members, will understand this. And I think they can get their societies, the one that are losing control and moving toward rapid price inflation, back into line.
But I think the campaign that AAU and ARL are involved in needs to be focused on faculty members. They produce the scholarship, and they’re the ones who would ultimately benefit from it being more available to them.
DR. PHELPS: My one sentence burst answer is that societies are conflicted for precisely the reasons Dave suggests. Journal publication is a source of revenue for these organizations that far exceeds publication cost of the journals themselves. And to the extent which other activities supported by that revenue are valued by the members of the society in furthering their own interest, that’s terrific.
It’s not just a publication that helps create dissemination of knowledge. For example, scholarly meetings are an extraordinary resource for doing that. And there are many other things which scholarly societies can do that will expand the dissemination of knowledge. Electronic communication offers an opportunity for learned societies to really position themselves at the center of an intellectual interface with their discipline in ways that have been unheard of before.
Think about the opportunity of putting manuscripts up with posted notes on them. Think of the opportunity for designating fellows as the person who can put the notes on, and members can read them. There are all sorts of ways you can elaborate those, but, fundamentally, societies are conflicted about all this. We’ve been in discussion with some learned societies during the course of exploring the decoupling proposal that the AAU Digital Intellectual Property Rights Committee has been working on and we’re witnessing that conflict in their response to these ideas. There is, I think, a potential conflict between the society staff and the membership that needs to be resolved.
UNIDENTIFIED: Dr. Shulenburger, you’ve laid the groundwork for the policy that you’ve taken to your board of trustees. I’d like to ask your advice as to how we replicate this kind of conversation on our campuses? Do you think it begins with the faculty or does it begin with discussions involving the provost and the deans?
And for Dr. Phelps, I want to raise the issue of who is responsible for providing access to that large repository of existing knowledge. Those of us with comprehensive collections recognize it as an obligation to continue to provide that access.
Recently, in the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC), we’ve adopted a concept that hasn’t been implemented yet. It recognizes that if someone is going to maintain access to a retrospective file of scholarship, then there has to be some compensation or some fair trade that takes place. I want to know whether you would support that concept.
DR. SHULENBURGER: There is abundant ignorance. It exists in all quarters on this problem, and I should not have been surprised, because I really wasn’t aware myself until I got motivated a couple of years ago to begin digging into it. There are people everywhere who simply believe that if we appropriate enough money that would solve the problem, and that’s what we ought to be doing. Wrong. Absolutely wrong.
We cannot buy our way out of this problem. If we try to buy our way out of this problem, the for-profit entities will simply raise prices and absorb every dollar we put into it. That is the wrong solution. And so, I think we have to go to each of the groups you mentioned and spell out the size of the problem, the magnitude of the problem. All of the groups you mentioned have their base in the faculty.
It is different when you go to a governing body. They don’t have this background that we have. But we have been able thus far to get our regents to suspend disbelief—about this NEAR idea. This thing they’re talking about in policy doesn’t exist. They’re writing a subjective. Were this animal to exist, we would have articles put in it.
I’m very proud of my regents.
DR. PHELPS: I agree fully that the faculty ultimately has to support these sorts of changes. And whatever we do has to be consistent with their own goals for us to achieve success. Most faculty have dual allegiance. They have an allegiance to their discipline which is national and international. And they have an allegiance to their institution which is more ephemeral. That international, national disciplinary focus means that as long as the faculty have a serious attention paid to that audience, we need to find things that are consistent with their goals in that world as well. And I think, for example, the NEAR proposal does that.
Now, let me turn to your questions to me. Certainly, one of the things that’s obvious to us all is that if the decoupling idea is to move forward successfully, there has to be a successful archival process in addition. This just doesn’t work without that. And that archival process can take place in a number of ways. The NEAR proposal provides one alternative. My slightly whimsical idea of archives of the ‘best hits’ of 1998 in field “X” is another. But I think this actually is a fairly serious alternative. Certainly, another is just printing off hard paper copies of electronic journals and putting them in a discrete number of repository libraries as back up in case we fail on our electronic updating.
The resources to undertake electronic archiving are not cheap. Everybody understands that. There’s a dual requirement: We determine how to support the certification process in a way that’s consistent with the market and with the goals of the faculty members and we also determine how to support the archival process. Ultimately, we may get some money from foundations to start that off.
But ultimately we have to be able to turn our internal resources and those of the libraries of United States universities and colleges, and elsewhere around the world, to support these endeavors. So I’m in full agreement with you that those are absolutely fundamental to our success in these areas.
MR. GHERMAN (Vanderbilt): I applaud your efforts. I have two questions. One, how do you feel you compare to your fellow provosts in grappling with this problem, in recognizing this problem and being willing to deal with it? Although we’ve heard from Shirley Baker that there have been changes in her provost, my sense is that this may not necessarily always be the case.
The second question is, if we put these policies for intellectual property in place but we don’t have that alternative that the faculty may utilize that policy, or to make that policy effective, it’s going to fall flat. How do we time the creation of NEAR and the creation of the policy that dictates faculty use NEAR?
DR. SHULENBURGER: That’s been the problem we’ve been grappling with. I have not approached any member of Congress or any association with a request that they establish NEAR, because we don’t have consensus.
I think if we began to go to outside groups to ask for some specific action while we don’t have consensus, we will do ourselves damage in the long run. My preferred course of action is to get bodies like ARL and the AAU and NASULGC to talk about this problem and to come to a set of solutions. If it’s NEAR, that’s great, but we need to come to agreement on a set of solutions and then begin to produce results.
Educating the faculty is really the first thing to do. They have to understand this problem, and it’s not at all impossible to educate them. It’s not very difficult. Ken Frazier, in fact, spoke to NASULGC this summer. We’ve been part of AAU’s academic officer gathering for three years where this is discussed, and I’ve seen Shirley’s description of provosts with blank looks. I saw that three years ago when the topic came up. There weren’t many people into it then, but I saw rapt attention to the topic this year.
I think the time is right that the folks on our side of the desk now understand the problem.
DR. PHELPS: There’s another part about this in terms of the creation of a NEAR type of project, and that is, there’s going to be some substantial political opposition from the commercial publishers.
We have a couple of allies in this, and this is an important aspect that I want all of us to understand. First, almost fortuitously in this case, most of the publishers we are worrying about are overseas in their primary bases. And that’s not an irrelevancy in our political process in terms of the journals. The second is, and you can hear this very clearly in the congressional testimony on the WIPO legislation, for example, the commercial publishers and producers of databases are vigorous in their argument that’s widely accepted. This is being carried out in the Commerce Committee primarily. They were very successful in selling the idea that we need to implement these intellectual property rights protection more vigorously in the electronic world because, if we don’t, it’s going to destroy a very important sector of the U.S. economy.
The counter of that argument is, I think, successful if we carry it forward gracefully. And that is that higher education in the United States is perhaps the most successful portion of our economy in every aspect of world trade that you can imagine, possibly with the exception of professional basketball.
(Laughter.)
Higher education is one of the most successful sectors in the U.S. economy. We are extraordinarily successful in higher education. And anything that throws sand in the gears of that process, the degradation of access to information most importantly, I think can be a persuasive argument in Congress.
We have to keep making that point. I made that point in my testimony in June 1998 in the Commerce Committee. And I got this sort of incredulous “you said what?” when I said that higher education was one of the most successful sectors of the U.S. economy. It is, and we’ve got to keep saying that.
MS. von WAHLDE (SUNY-Buffalo): I wanted to follow up Paul Gherman’s comments. I’m probably one of the few ARL directors who does not report to the provost, so my opportunities to speak with him and influence him and educate him on this issue are fairly minimal, although he is interested in the topic.
My comment is that I think you two, as representatives of the provostial group, have an extraordinary responsibility which I hope you will bear and take on to be champions for this cause with your colleagues so that we in turn can focus on educating our faculty, which I think is quite doable. But we need provosts to provide this leadership nationally.
And there are many ways to do that. We depend on you to be out there in front and we will back you and follow you all the way. But you’ve got to step forward as you have today and assume this responsibility and broaden your group of colleagues and peers to work on it. Thank you.
DR. PHELPS: Thank you. It’s not just the provost side. I am blessed by having a president that strongly supports my work in going out into these issues. He understands the extraordinary priority of this, and that’s partly why we also keep pushing on the presidents of the AAU—to make sure that the message gets back up to the people we report to.
I just want to urge one little word of caution as we go out on this limb with you. We’ll hold hand in hand with you, but you also have to understand that we have a broader set of resource questions than just the libraries that we have to confront. So while we will champion libraries in this work of digital medium communication, it has to be in the context of the other resource demands in our universities. And I hope you will bear with us when we sometimes say no.
DR. SHULENBURGER: The ability to get presidents and chancellors really involved in this is going to depend upon how well we think through the process and the precision of the solution with which we arrive. They’re aware of the difficulties. But they’re going to have to speak about generalities until we give them some specifics.
So I think when we’re putting out a bunch of ideas, we want those crystallized, and as we get them crystallized, I think we’ll find a lot of chancellors and presidents willing to champion this.
MR. BRANIN (SUNY-Stony Brook) I agree that the copyright ownership issue is fundamental to this situation. And it seems to me that scholars, our faculty, are key to the copyright ownership issue. My experience in talking with faculty about this has been that they’re very concerned about losing their free agency status with regards to copyright and ownership. They are concerned with the idea that there may be a federal law or a university requirement that they share their copyright or limit their distribution rights.
There’s a lot of discussion going on now in the SUNY system regarding courseware and the ownership of courseware. And there’s great opposition to any kind of university or governmental regulation of that. The unions are taking it up.
How do you deal with that problem or the challenge of faculty resistance to giving up any complete control of their copyright?
DR. SHULENBURGER: What Chuck said a while ago is absolutely key. Faculty members have greater identity with their profession than with their universities. Publication in top quality journals is the coin of realm. It makes them marketable. It makes it possible for them to move from place to place. If you threaten the ability to publish at all, you threaten the livelihood of faculty members.
With intellectual property policies, you have to be very specific about the kind of property you’re talking about. The intellectual property policy that we’ve written in Kansas has eight or ten different categories of property. The NEAR proposal leaves the basic copyright with the faculty member. It lets the faculty member send to whatever journal they want and work with that journal in publication. It simply requires that a portion of it go into what I call the public domain. It’s not quite that. The journal would still have the only right to publish it as a journal article. But I think you’ve got to be cognizant of why faculty members are concerned about infringements in this area and design policies that deal with that concern. Any attempt to simply say, “We paid your salary. We gave you the resources. Therefore, we own the journal article,” would get Chuck Phelps killed.
(Laughter.)
DR. PHELPS: I might as well just jump out of the airplane on the way home and save everybody the trouble.
(Laughter.)
DR. PHELPS: Part of this is also an educational matter. In fact, when we publish an article as scholars, we completely give away the copyright now. I don’t think very many faculty members think about it and it surprises me occasionally. I still publish scholarly work. I just got an article accepted yesterday by the Journal of Risk and Uncertainty. It’s a Kluwer publication. The editor’s a good friend of mine from Harvard. He sent me this lovely letter, “Congratulations, Chuck. Really nice piece of work. Surprised you can still do this while you’re working as provost.” I didn’t tell him I did most of it before I became provost and took me five years to get it out the door.
(Laughter.)
DR. PHELPS: And then attached right behind that was the standard Kluwer, give us your copyright, signed over in blood, to this piece of work. You know, a year ago, I would have signed that without batting an eye. And I’m really seriously thinking now about the question—you know, I have tenure now. I don’t need another publication. I’m actually seriously thinking about putting this question up to them.
But ultimately, we have to confront these journals, and none of us want to do it as faculty members on a one-by-one basis. This is an enormous collective action problem. And if we can find a way to break that collective action problem, this is a piece of cake. I think every scholar in the country, or almost every scholar, will realize this is in our collective good if we can get everybody to do it. But nobody wants to be the first mover.
That’s really our problem in some ways. It is not what to do, but strategically how to get from here to NEAR and FAR.
MS. HOFFMAN (York University): I’ve another question about the NEAR proposal. Do you anticipate that the number of journals will change if NEAR becomes reality?
DR. SHULENBURGER: I suspect so. I suspect that there would be some diminution in the numbers of journals, but I think that’s going to be replaced by new journals springing up. The electronic age is a wonderful thing.
The ability to produce collections of knowledge that speak to a specific set of scholars, that’s going to keep producing new journals as new sets of ideas come up. And I think that’s useful so long as it’s not so costly and we can afford to operate it. So I would expect more turnover perhaps than we have now.
DR. PHELPS: I think one of the things that will happen is that these niche publications tend to turn more to strictly electronic publishing. And to the extent that that is cheaper and more effective, we can applaud that. The reason I started my talk with that little economics lesson from Adam Smith is that the subdivision of knowledge is going to continue apace.
And every time one of my faculty members gets into one of those sub-fields and publishes in it, there’s a demand placed on my library to get that journal. And a demand placed on all of the other libraries around the country from people that are doing work in that field. It may be of interest to only 400 people and you figure how much they’re going to try and price that to support the editorial process for those 400 people. And we’ll all buy it under our current circumstances. We all will, unless we take some extraordinary internal steps in the way we do and think about it.
MR. FRAZIER (University of Wisconsin): What do you say to GEAR—Global Electronic Article Repository? The SPARC initiative was born international. There’s actually a higher participation by Canadian research institutions than there is by American research institutions as a percentage. And also the question that we keep asking in SPARC, what’s the first practical step that we could take to get your vision in test mode and to build a model to start implementation? What would you propose that we might do to get this rolling?
DR. SHULENBURGER: I’m a provost, not a chancellor. I think locally, not globally for that reason. So my motto is first the nation, then the world.
(Laughter.)
If we can do it the other way around, Ken, I’m all in favor of doing that. I don’t know whether it’s desirable to start small and work large. I suppose if we thought that were the thing to do, we could gather together a group of scholarly societies that are worried to death about how they’re going to archive stuff long term and say, look, we’ll take that over for you.
The price will be that 90 days after publication, your journal goes into this repository. Maybe you’d get some folks to go along. But I’m not much for gradualism right now.
DR. PHELPS: Ken, I think it’s a very interesting idea. Remember, Dave’s first path to that outcome is to get a federal law. And path two is to get some collaboration among the universities and colleges in the United States.
The first requires intervention of our government. If you go to multiple countries, you are involving multiple governments. And if you take the second step and try to do it collaboratively, you’ll most likely be dealing more intensively in this country than others, but everywhere with anti-trust issues that we’d have to concern ourselves with. It may be that going globally as the first step would be most important. It may be that the strategy is to have the U.S. be a leader and do a model policy, allowing others to follow. These are the strategy choices we have to think about more.
MR. BILLINGS (University of Texas): Let me admit to some ignorance here, and perhaps it’s because I’m not an economist. I’m not exactly sure how you see that NEAR is going to depress the initial cost of journals. It seems to me that NEAR is at the rear end instead of at the front end.
In effect, we have a version of NEAR right now. It’s called fair use. We have access and deliver either physically or electronically, so forth and so on. But it would seem to me that if we could move the distribution along with decoupling up at the front end instead of the rear end, you’re making a much more dramatic impact on the whole manner in which we provide scholarly communication. I just don’t understand why NEAR is going to depress the initial cost that are charged by publishers.
DR. SHULENBURGER: This is empirically verifiable, but I would think that most journal articles are, in fact, accessed beyond the 90-day period that I’m talking about and not solely within the 90-day period in which the journal would have exclusive ownership of the material. I’m terribly concerned in the electronic age if we move away from fair use to contracts that say you’ve got access to this publication for a year—your subscription period—and beyond that, you don’t have access to it at all. Access should belong to us long term. I want to move that into the academy. I think when you truncate the period when the journal has exclusive right to the article, you truncate what the journal’s selling. It’s selling 90-day access. It’s no longer selling permanent access under copyright or, under contract, one-year access.
And 90-day access is worth a lot less than a year’s access. I think it would have the effect of reducing the price, myself. A lot of libraries would simply say we like this material a lot—but for $18,000 a year, we can wait 90 days.
DR. PHELPS: One point I want to emphasize is that the fair use law is operating under attack in the digital world. There are substantial attempts to restrict fair use in the digital world. You can hear that all over the WIPO implementation discussions.
And a second point is that even under the current copyright law, a lot of ambiguity exists. For example, when we try to assemble things like course packs for faculty, we incur royalty fees to publishers to republish the work that we wrote. And the cost of that has driven a lot of faculty in reducing the amount of readings they’re giving to students. They’ve changed the way they do courses.
I’m not saying it’s a lethal blow to universities, but it’s throwing sand in the gears. And it’s not just the publication of the journals themselves, it’s the subsequent use downstream. Finally, I just want to recognize that the storage costs for journals is also not a trivial portion of the full cost of acquiring a journal. That each acquisition includes the subscription price, the index, the binding. It includes the physical space to store that sucker. And overall—I’ve been playing around a little with this—I suspect that the journal acquisition price itself, the subscription fee, represents probably over half, but no ways 80 or 90 percent of the full cost of a journal. That will vary some, obviously depending on whether it’s a $3,000 or a $30,000 journal subscription.
But we got to be careful when we think about these things. It’s not just the subscription price. The storage would be reduced if we went to the electronic world. The demands on additional space in our libraries would be resolved. There’s a lot of additional benefits as well.
DR. SHULENBURGER: Inter-library loan costs would be eliminated essentially.
MR. MOSHER (University of Pennsylvania): Just a few questions. One is to consider the issue of the U.S. scholar who publishes, as a great many do, in European or foreign journals and how this works out in that regard? My second question concerns legislation that would tell you how you must publish and whether that might have constitutional or legal problems of its own in terms of free speech.
The final question is just wondering whether, with the JSTOR project, there’s any indication that this project reduced the price of any of the journals covered by JSTOR?
DR. SHULENBURGER: I don’t know the answer to the legal question. And it troubles me, but the wealth of this nation is in large part a result of the research generated in its universities. I think that the legal framework can be changed, can be altered if we show the Congress that there’s a convincing threat towards access to scholarship. And I’d encourage us to start doing that.
DR. PHELPS: Obviously, the concepts of fair use that are built into the U.S. copyright law are evidence that we understand and are willing to make balances on those issues. In terms of the question about whether the constraints on property rights that are suggested in NEAR would alter that intellectual freedom of discussion, there is, I think, a pretty convincing argument that nothing in this NEAR proposal alters the ability for people to say what they want, which I think is the most important thing to our faculty and to us.
This simply increases and enhances the distributional value. So I don’t think there’s an issue in terms of free speech that raises any serious concerns to me. I do think there is a question of balancing who shares the value. Where is that value being placed? Is it just shareholders of Elsevier and Kluwer or is it in the economy more broadly?
We need to keep pushing those ideas. As for JSTOR, an interesting question. We’re both empirical economists. I suspect we’ll both delve in and see if we can figure that out. Mark McCabe, who spoke yesterday, may well be positioned to do that, too. In fact, he will be ideally positioned given the database he’s assembled.
(Applause.)