NYSHEI News

July 4, 2010

Canadian University Hopes to Lead Fight Against High Subscription Prices

IMPORTANT NOTE: If you are going to read this article please also read this: http://researchknowledge.ca/en/news/documents/CRKNOpenLettertoChronicleofHigherEducation12Jul10.pdf.  And continue to the comment at the end of the article.

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Mark Leggott, a librarian at the University of Prince Edward Island, has proposed a “Wikipedia-type index to scholarly literature” called Knowledge for All.

By Jennifer Howard

Famous for mussels, serenity, and as the setting for Anne of Green Gables, Prince Edward Island, the smallest of Canada’s provinces, seems an unlikely hotbed of revolution. But at the University of Prince Edward Island, the province’s only university, a bit of scholarly-communication revolt is stirring.

On June 15, the university librarian, Mark Leggott, released a campus letter to let the faculty know the institution would not be renewing its subscription to the Web of Science database. Mr. Leggott’s letter cited several reasons for the decision: “a challenging fiscal climate,” a required three-year contract with price increases every year, a weaker Canadian dollar that would make those increases even harder to bear.

But here are the real fighting words: “Any subscription increase in these challenging times is difficult, but an increase of 120 percent is simply not acceptable,” Mr. Leggott wrote. “Accommodating this level of increase lends credence to the vendors’ business practices, and we felt it important to make a stand against these practices.” Tellingly, the letter cites the recent standoff between the University of California system and the Nature Publishing Group over journal prices.

Published by Thomson Reuters, Web of Science is a citation index that covers more than 10,000 scholarly journals across a variety of disciplines. It allows users to track what’s been cited and how often. Its multiple databases include conference proceedings and open-access journals, too. In the eyes of Mr. Leggott, it’s also an overpriced product of a scholarly publishing system that no longer works. That’s what he told me when I asked why the university wasn’t going to renew.

“We just said enough is enough,” he said. “These citation indexes are just not special any more, and we’re in a period where financial challenges plus lack of innovation in the [publishing] industry are causing people to say, This just doesn’t make sense anymore.”

He called it “absolutely critical” that research institutions be franker about their dealings with publishers and their pricing models. That applies to small universities like his as well as to enormous systems like California’s.

“We have a tendency to keep our negotiations confidential and quiet, and I think it’s the most egregious process we can follow,” Mr. Leggott told me. “We have been silent for way too long in letting it be known that this kind of scholarly publishing process is not sustainable.”

So a small Canadian university decides to give a citation index the heave-ho. So what? For one thing, observers nowhere near Prince Edward Island took note of the decision. For instance, the Law Librarian Blog saluted UPEI along with the California system for using their run-ins with publishers to make faculty members aware of how the traditional publishing ecosystem really works—and what it costs. “Most people outside of the librarians and deans do not really ‘get’ the price thing as it relates to scholarship,” the blog observed. “Now they do, at least at UC and UPEI.”

As the Law Librarian Blog pointed out, UPEI has done more than just cancel one subscription, and that makes its decision worth keeping tabs on. Mr. Leggott and the library staff took another practical and immediate step: They put together a guide of databases that provide the kind of citation-reference searching that Web of Science does. (The university will acquire a pay-as-you-go license to Web of Science for faculty members who really can’t find a good alternative.)

Another gambit is far more ambitious. Mr. Leggott sees the Web of Science decision as an opportunity “to raise awareness around all these issues and see if there’s any interest in building a different kind of approach.” What he has in mind is “a Wikipedia-type index to scholarly literature” called Knowledge for All. Open source and freely available, the index would be built and maintained by libraries—not just UPEI’s but as many as are willing to pitch in.

Mr. Leggott envisions Knowledge for All as an index built “using the elbow grease of the institution rather than the increasingly dwindling resources we have,” he told me. “The goal here would be to index all of what can be identified as scholarly, whether it’s peer reviewed or not peer reviewed.”

Mr. Leggott is circulating the proposal to library consortia in Canada and abroad, hoping to get 10 to 20 institutions to sign on as founding members to hire a project manager and get the project in gear. It could mean only a modest outlay of money and staff time for participating institutions. The librarian estimates that there are some 40,000 science journals published every year; if 3,000 libraries pitched in, he calculates, “then each of them would have to index 15 journal titles.” Instead of paying money to commercial publishers for products such as Web of Science, libraries could put their resources to work indexing the scholarly literature themselves.

Mr. Leggott says his job now is to convince other librarians that the idea has legs. His message: “Rather than paying into a dysfunctional scholarly-publishing environment, the library community should take the lead and make sure that knowledge that’s created largely by scholarly communities is not locked behind a pay wall.”

Whatever happens with the Knowledge for All project, it will be interesting to see whether UPEI’s decision to ditch one of its standard databases will embolden librarians elsewhere to take similar measures. We’re still waiting for one side or the other to blink in the California-Nature standoff, and what happens there will surely have a ripple effect. A big system like California’s, with its combined research heft, has a decent chance of getting publishers to pay attention. Will publishers and other libraries sit up and take notice when a small university like UPEI says it’s had enough?

Content providers may not care that much—if the action is limited to one small customer. Mr. Leggott says he has heard very little from Web of Science, and no details on how it will make sure that UPEI has access to Web of Science materials it has already paid for. “There seems to be little time or concern for a little institution like UPEI,” Mr. Leggott told me.

But if UPEI can get enough other institutions to make Knowledge for All a serious experiment—or if it helps inspire other colleges and universities to take their own stands with publishers—its influence could exceed its size.

“A small university can have a big impact when there’s a little bit of vision there,” Mr. Leggott said.

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The June 8, 2010 NYSHEI Annual Meeting will enjoy the generous support of Thomson Reuters.

Since the formation of NYSHEI, Thomson Reuters has sponsored the NYSHEI annual event at the highest levels.  Continuing in this fashion, Thomson Reuters will again serve as a platinum-level sponsor of the event taking place at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs.

“Thomson Reuters offers terrific support to NYSHEI.  It is hard to imagine one of our annual meetings occurring with them,” said NYSHEI Executive Director Jason Kramer.  “I am most grateful to the folks of Thomson Reuters and confident that we can continue our strong relationship for years to come.”

Registration is open for the June 8th event, and is free to all staff of NYSHEI member institutions.

The upcoming NYSHEI Annual Meeting will enjoy the robust backing of Elsevier.  Continuing their regular support of NYSHEI events, Elsevier is again among the most generous sponsors of the annual gathering of NYSHEI.

“I am very pleased that – again – Elsevier has decided to demonstrate its commitment to the NYSHEI mission by generously underwriting our event.  It is because of them, and our other sponsors, that we are able to offer annual meeting at no cost to our participants and attendees,” said NYSHEI Executive Director Jason Kramer.  “I sincerely thank the folks at Elsevier.”

For the second straight year Elsevier is a Platinum-level sponsor.

The NYSHEI annual meeting is set for June 8, 2010 at Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs.

The Business Council of New York State today released a memorandum of support for the Academic Research Information Access (ARIA) act.

In their memo, the Business Council states:

“This legislation serves several purposes vital to ensuring New York’s economy is positioned to stabilize and grow, including supporting increased access and communication among our colleges and universities in support of their programs, and linking the work of our universities to that of the regional economies in which they operate.  Most importantly it provides a missing link between our research universities and the private sector, from mature firms to start-ups, where the importance of innovation is essential to furthering their growth.  This legislation will bridge the academic-industry divide through making available to the private sector, in particular those entrepreneurial and start-up companies, the same science, technical and medical publications needed by faculty-based researchers.  The money spent by public and private college, university and research libraries in New York to license online resources can have much greater impact if it is spent cooperatively through statewide shared licenses rather than individually. Not only can a wider array of online materials be made available to campuses and research libraries throughout the state, but through shared licensing, more affordable options for libraries at small campuses can support coursework for students in workforce development programs that are at the heart of our competitive state economy.”

Read the full memo here.

The Business Council of New York State, Inc., is the leading business organization in New York State, representing the interests of large and small firms throughout the state. Its membership is made up of thousands of member companies, as well as local chambers of commerce and professional and trade associations.