1. Scholarly Communication: Threats, Problems and Opportunities
Presentation to the Council on Libraries
Dartmouth College
5/10/04
Barbara DeFelice, Head, Kresge Physical Sciences Library
Jim Fries, Head, Feldberg Business and Engineering Library
Co-chairs of the Digital Library Content Working Group
Dartmouth College Library COL

2. Dartmouth College Library COL
Scholarly Communication: Part 2: Innovations and Initiatives in Scholarly Communication Worldwide
Emerging Economic Models for Scholarly Publishing
Open Access Movement
C. Initiatives in Scholarly Information Management
D. New Technologies for Managing Scholarly Information
Dartmouth College Library COL

3. Dartmouth College Library COL
Summary of Part 1
Part 1: Threats and problems facing the scholarly communication system; how did we get here?
Overview of threats and problems
Social system and history of scholarly communication
Economics
Policy and legal issues
Emerging information systems
Dartmouth College Library COL

4. The BIG Problems: Cost, Access, Copyright
“… the subscription costs have risen by much more than inflation. Some
publishers acquire groups of journals and sell them electronically to
libraries in a single package. This poses a new problem for libraries. Paper
copies of journals reside on shelves for ever, but the content of journals
bought online may be available only for the lifetime of the subscription.
Another issue is that once copyright is surrendered, anyone wanting to look
at that research in the future, including the researchers and the body that
funded them, must pay whether they read the paper journals or access
them online. Thus, the Wellcome Trust, which funds £400m of research a
year, is denied opportunities to disseminate the results of studies it funds.“
Quote from the April 30th 2004 Financial Times (London) article on page 14 “The Paperless revolution in knowledge: Scientific Publishing”, by Dr. Mark Walport, Director of the Wellcome Trust regarding the Wellcome Trust funded study “Costs and Business Models in Scientific Research Publishing”, April 29,2004
Dartmouth College Library COL

5. Economic Models for Scholarly Publishing - Now
Package pricing by publisher for all content with digital or digital/print mix options; blocks on canceling titles, set % inflation/year; excellent cross searching, discovery and management services provided (Elsevier, Project Muse)
Consortium purchase; “cross access” to unsubscribed content
Subscription required for current months or year, then free access to backfiles (High Wire Press-Science and other journals)
Free access to certain issues or sections; subscription required to access all issues or complete journal. (OUP Nucleic Acids Research, Nature, Science)
Backfiles access: yearly subscriptions (ACS) vs one-time fee
• Cooperative publishing: scholarly societies combining aspects of their publishing to create a combined product (GeoscienceWorld)
Copyright generally held by publisher
Aggregators; annual fee, no long term access; embargoes on current issues: EBSCO, Lexis/Nexis
Dartmouth College Library COL

6. Economic Models for Scholarly Publishing - New
Movement away from subscription based access-but then who pays the costs of publishing?
Author pays a fee to publish an article
Institutional or grant fund support directed to the publisher funds authors to publish in that publisher’s journals
Mixed subscription and author pays models
“Unprecedented uncertainty”
Economic and access models in constant flux
Dartmouth College Library COL

7. Open Access Movement: Definitions and Frameworks
Framing the Open Access Issue – Association of Research Libraries
DC Principles for Free Access to science-Not for Profit Publishers
Bethesda Principles-Biomedical Research Community
Budapest Open Access Initiative Open Society Institute; international scholarly societies
Directory of Open Access Journals –Definition includes access, quality, research.
Dartmouth College Library COL

8. Open Access Movement: ARL Frameworks
Open access is a cost-effective way to disseminate and use information. It is an alternative to the traditional subscription-based publishing model made possible by new digital technologies and networked communications. .. refers to works that are created with no expectation of direct monetary return and made available at no cost to the reader on the public Internet for purposes of education and research.
Open access operates within the current legal framework of copyright law. Authors own the original copyright in their works.
Open access is intended to be free for readers, not free for producers. The costs of producing digital open-access literature are believed much lower than the costs of producing print literature, but financial and human resources are required. Author or institutional fees for dissemination have been proposed as possible alternatives to the traditional library subscription model for funding the costs of open access.
Open access focuses on academic research. Open access is concerned with scientific and research texts that scholars give to the community without expectation of direct monetary return, including peer-reviewed journal articles, preprints, preliminary findings, and data sets.
Open access and peer review. Open access does not mean that peer review is bypassed.
Dartmouth College Library COL

9. Open Access Movement: DC Principles
DC Principles for Free Access to science
1. As not-for-profit publishers, we see it as our mission to maintain and enhance the independence, rigor, trust, and visibility that have established scholarly journals as reliable filters of information emanating from clinical and laboratory research.
2. …we reinvest all of the revenue from our journals in the direct support of science worldwide, including scholarships, scientific meetings, grants, educational outreach, advocacy for research funding, the free dissemination of information for the public, and improvements in scientific publishing.
3. …we have introduced and will continue to support the following forms of free access:
Selected important articles of interest are free online from the time of publication;
The full text of our journals is freely available to everyone worldwide either immediately or within months of publication, depending on each publisher's business and publishing requirements;
The content of our journals is available free to scientists working in many low-income nations;
Articles are made available free online through reference linking between these journals;
content is available for indexing by major search engines . readers worldwide can easily locate information.
4. …develop long-term preservation solutions for online journals to ensure the ongoing availability of the scientific literature.
5. We will continue to work with authors, peer-reviewers, and editors for the development of robust online and electronic tools to improve efficiency of their important intellectual endeavors.
6. …support the principle that publication fees should not be borne solely by researchers and their funding institutions, because the ability to publish in scientific journals should be available equally to all scientists worldwide, no matter what their economic circumstances.
7. …we believe that a free society allows for the co-existence of many publishing models, and we will continue to work closely with our publishing colleagues to set high standards for the scholarly publishing enterprise.
Dartmouth College Library COL

10. Open Access Movement: Bethesda Principles
Bethesda Principles provide a definition of Open Access from the Biomedical Research Community
An Open Access Publication is one that meets the following two conditions:
1. The author(s) and copyright holder(s) grant(s) to all users a free, irrevocable, worldwide, perpetual right of access to, and a license to copy, use, distribute, transmit and display the work publicly and to make and distribute derivative works, in any digital medium for any responsible purpose, subject to proper attribution of authorship, as well as the right to make small numbers of printed copies for their personal use.*
2. A complete version of the work and all supplemental materials, including a copy of the permission as stated above, in a suitable standard electronic format is deposited immediately upon initial publication in at least one online repository that is supported by an academic institution, scholarly society, government agency, or other well-established organization that seeks to enable open access, unrestricted distribution, interoperability, and long-term archiving (for the biomedical sciences, PubMed Central is such a repository).
Dartmouth College Library COL

11. Open Access Movement: Definitions and Frameworks
Budapest Open Access Initiative: A new program that calls for self-archiving by scholars and the creation of new, open-access journals. Open Society Institute, George Soros private foundation
… scholars need the means to launch a new generation of journals committed to open access, and to help existing journals that elect to make the transition to open access. Because journal articles should be disseminated as widely as possible, these new journals will no longer invoke copyright to restrict access to and use of the material they publish. Instead they will use copyright and other tools to ensure permanent open access to all the articles they publish. Because price is a barrier to access, these new journals will not charge subscription or access fees, and will turn to other methods for covering their expenses. There are many alternative sources of funds for this purpose, including the foundations and governments that fund research, the universities and laboratories that employ researchers, endowments set up by discipline or institution, friends of the cause of open access, profits from the sale of add-ons to the basic texts, funds freed up by the demise or cancellation of journals charging traditional subscription or access fees, or even contributions from the researchers themselves. There is no need to favor one of these solutions over the others for all disciplines or nations, and no need to stop looking for other, creative alternatives.
Dartmouth College Library COL

12. Open Access Movement: Definitions and Frameworks, cont.
Directory of Open Access Journals Definition
Access: the right of "users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles" is mandatory for a journal to be included in the directory; no delay; user registration online is accepted.
Quality: must exercise quality control on submitted papers through an editor, editorial board and/or a peer-review system
Research: Journals that report primary results of research or overviews of research results to a scholarly community.
Dartmouth College Library COL

13. Open Access Publishers and Publications
Preprint archives such as arXiv.org at Cornell
BioMedCentral an independent publishing house committed to providing immediate free access to peer-reviewed biomedical research
Public Library of Science a non-profit organization of scientists and physicians committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource…To realize this potential, a new business model for scientific publishing is required that treats the costs of publication as the final integral step of the funding of a research project.
Directory of Open Access Journals includes Dartmouth’s Linguistic Discovery among its 1,081 titles
Dartmouth College Library COL

14. Open Access Controversies
But what does “Open Access” really mean in terms of the economics of scholarly publishing? Open access brings some challenges. Open access or not, print or online, journals are still expensive to produce and “open access” should not be confused with “free.” While readers would not pay for access, the costs are paid for in other ways. The financial support comes from individual and institutional subscriptions and dues.
The Promise and Peril of “Open Access”
Pricing and Access Models changing quickly
Elsevier’s position on OA (article in Nature, BioMedCentral response)
Impact on peer review and quality control systems
Effect on impact factor of a journal?
Changes in access and cost .
Dartmouth College Library COL

15. Initiatives in Scholarly Information Management
JSTOR
SPARC
H-Net
NSDL
History EBooks project
• University Presses-Columbia University Press projects Ciao
• REPEC-Economics
Institutional Repositories
Dartmouth College Library COL

16. Institutional Repositories
Digital archive created and maintained for locally created content (also called an institution's intellectual assets) such as dissertations, working papers, preprints
Relies on and assumes commitment of the institution for the long term
Connector is the institution but can be discipline or format based as well.
Reasons to consider are : quantity of born digital scholarship, concern over control and dissemination of this material, concern for long-term archiving.
Traditional institutional responsibilities include Records Management and University Archives
DSpace is an open access information system designed specifically to help collect and manage this information.
Dartmouth College Library COL

17. Dartmouth College Library COL
Conclusion
What does this mean for scholarship, research and teaching at Dartmouth?
Access is constrained by cost and restricted by copyright
Open access shifts costs but does not contain them
Next time we’ll discuss what we could do here at Dartmouth
Cost increases
Dartmouth College Library COL

18. Scholarly Communication: Threats, Problems and Opportunities
Acknowledgements:
The members of the Digital Library Content Working Group helped us frame these topics, contributed to discussions of the issues, and developed some of the slides used in this presentation.
John Cocklin
Laura K. Graveline
Lucinda M. Hall
John R. James
Margaret K. Sleeth
Reinhart Sonnenburg
Dartmouth College Library COL