It has been a season of discontent with publishers. After HarperCollins announced in March that they were going to impose a 26 checkout limit on ebooks licensed to libraries, a number of libraries began boycotting HarperCollins and refusing to purchase Harpercollins ebooks, with a few taking the next logical step and boycotting print titles as well. New Jersey public librarian Andy Woodworth started an online petition to challenge HarperCollins, and apparently tens of thousands of people have signed it. So far, it’s had little effect on HarperCollins that I can tell.

That scandal made the library news, but another petition and call for boycott didn’t. The philosophy of science journal Synthese published a special issue on Evolution and Its Rivals (subscription definitely required).The online version came out as the guest editors intended, but when the print edition was released in March, and unbeknownst to the guest editors, the editors-in-chief inserted a disclaimer saying they had observed “”that some of the papers in this issue employ a tone that may make it hard to distinguish between dispassionate intellectual discussion of other views and disqualification of a targeted author or group.” Most people interpreted this as a criticism of Barbara Forrest’s article, “The non-epistemology of intelligent design: its implications for public policy.” The New York Times article about the incident reported her article used “language some would later criticize as unfit for a scholarly journal” in criticizing noted Intelligent Design (ID) proponent Francis Beckwith. The “some” who later criticized the article were apparently Beckwith and Beckwith supporters, who allegedly complained and threatened legal action. I read through the article, and while it’s a devastating critique of the epistemological claims of ID to be taken seriously as science, it doesn’t seem to me to have language unfit for a scholarly journal. If you subscribe to Synthese, you can judge for yourself.  (And check out John S. Wilkins’ article “Are Creationists Rational?” in the same issue, in which he argues they are, at least within a “bounded rationality model of belief choices.”) The guest editors complained to well known philosopher and philosophy blogger Brian Leiter that they had known nothing about the disclaimer. He called for a boycott and started a petition demanding an apology and retraction of the disclaimer from the Synthese editors-in-chief, among other things. The apology and retraction have been just as forthcoming from the editors as a change in ebook policy has been from HarperCollins. Another philosopher called for a subscription boycott as well. Depending on how libraries get access to this particular Springer journal, such a boycott might not be possible.

These two controversies are different in the relationships between the petitioners and their targets. Public librarians are merely consumers of HarperCollins ebooks, but philosophers are the editors, reviewers, and contributors to Synthese. Somehow I doubt HarperCollins will lose much money, and they might even join Simon and Schuster and MacMillan in not allowing ebook licenses to libraries at all. However, an effective boycott of Synthese could destroy not only the reputation but the existence of a top philosophy journal.

A third controversy began a couple of years ago when Oxford U. Press, Cambridge U. Press, and Sage sued Georgia State University over alleged copyright violations in their handling of ereserves. They have now, in the words of Inside Higher Education, “proposed an injunction that, if approved by a judge, would make Georgia State University comply with strict guidelines for copying and distributing copyrighted texts.” The implications of the injunction have been covered very effectively by Barbara Fister in the Library Journal and the Duke University Scholarly Communications Officer Kevin Smith on Duke’s scholarly communication blog, and by several people in this CHE article. Fister likened the injunction to Soviet attempts to suppress free speech, while Smith called it a “nightmare scenario for higher education.” The injunction would prevent GSU “from creating, reproducing, transmitting, selling, or in any manner distributing, or assisting, participating in, soliciting, encouraging, or facilitating the creation, reproduction, download, display, sale, or distribution in any manner of, copies, whether in hard copy format, digital or electronic computer files, or any other format, of any and all Works without permission,” where permission means paying a fee to the Copyright Clearance Center.

That’s pretty dire stuff. If I’m interpreting it right, and I very well might not be, the injunction would include, for example, a professor taking an article from JSTOR and loading that article onto her Blackboard site, or a library from putting the file on ereserve. That is, a university would have to pay extra for permission to distribute to students journal articles that the university’s library had already subscribed to for a full campus license. Though this might be the extreme example, it would seem to consider “facilitating the distribution” of digital documents that were already paid for and accessible to the entire campus community to be a violation of copyright. This seems utterly foolish to me, so if I’ve misinterpreted the extent of the injunction, please let me know. Most would say that the scenario I described is indeed a violation of copyright law, to which I have a couple of replies. First, if so, then current copyright law is unjust law, and thus deserves to be civilly disobeyed. It is contrary to the mission of the university to create and disseminate knowledge, and to the Constitution’s intent that copyright exists to promote science and the useful arts. Second, any law that prohibits such distribution is not only unjust, but stupid, which is why the intelligent professoriate ignores it.

While there has been some press coverage, I haven’t seen any call for a boycott of Oxford, Cambridge, and Sage titles, except in a few comments on the articles mentioning the injunction. That there seems to have been little or no response from any faculty is disappointing, though not that surprising considering the problems the open access movement has had. The injunction would be very difficult to enforce, as the oversight of faculty would be almost impossible, but the very fact that respectable academic presses are seeking an injunction so restrictive it borders on the absurd should give everyone pause. It’s one thing to protest scanning large chunks of a print book
and putting it on the open web (which allegedly is the sort of thing that prompted this lawsuit in the first place), or putting up works by commercial presses. It’s another thing entirely when publishers want to restrict access to scholarly works or expect copyright payments for articles that already have campus-wide licenses, which would be the case for anything from a campus-wide subscription database that is used in ereserves or placed on learning management systems.

I’d like to see some faculty call for a boycott just to see what the response would be. A boycott by librarians would be impossible. No decent academic library could just refuse to purchase or license material from those three publishers. The quality, for the most part, is just too high, and there would be faculty protests. A faculty boycott would have to be a precursor to any library boycott. If and only if the quality of their publications dropped because top scholars refused to publish, review, or edit for them would libraries be able to boycott them effectively. It would be interesting just to see the response from the publishers. Better still would be for scholars to move to open access publications to finally make the fruits of scholarship universally accessible like they should have been all along.

Most of you are probably familiar with the Alternative Press Index. If you’re not familiar, you might check out their “history” page. Here are some selected quotes:

the Alternative Press Index (API), a unique and comprehensive guide to the alternative press in English, French and Spanish

With increased corporate conglomeration in the media industry, readers are now turning to the alternative press for news and analysis.

The Alternative Press Centre (APC) is a periodicals library and nonprofit collective that promotes access to independent and critical sources of news and information.

The APC networks with activist librarians, such as the Progressive Librarians Guild.

The spirit of the late 60s brought new publications that reflected the movements of the time

The original founders came together to promote a many-sided dialogue aimed at the development of a radical consciousness by providing the tools for analysis that are necessary for meaningful social change.

I’ve also been wanting to enter the discussion Meridith Farkas started over Ebsco getting exclusive and expensive control over a journal her community needs. On a number of collection issues, lately I’ve wanted to just link to Barbara Fister’s columns in the Library Journal and comment, "Yeah, what she said," especially since in this case she’s partly said what I’ve already said in Dealing with the Pusher Man, including a comment on journal title monopolies with title comparisons that sounds awfully familiar.

But what I have to say is related to part of the  Ithaka Faculty Survey 2009, 

Let me back up, though. There are a lot of things I think librarians have done right in the past few decades. Unlike some, I think they’ve been adapting and adopting and changing for a long time. But there’s one problem that librarians have tried to solve for thirty years and failed. When it comes to the so-called serials crisis, librarians have screwed the pooch. (If you’re unfamiliar with the phrase, then read or watch The Right Stuff, ideally both.)  And you know what? It’s not our fault. To slightly adapt Chuck Yeager, sometimes you get a pooch that no one cares is being screwed. 

Consider this "finding" from the Ithaka survey: "Despite several years of sustained efforts by publishers, scholarly societies, libraries, faculty members, and others to reform various aspects of the scholarly communications system, a fundamentally conservative set of faculty attitudes continues to impede systematic change." Like the other findings, this one will hardly come as a surprise to librarians.

Librarians have been cutting serials and complaining about vendors for a generation at least, and working diligently to educate academics about the economics of scholarly communication for over a decade. Even I once gave a talk to faculty showing how the rise in STM serial prices made it harder for junior professors in the humanities to get tenure, and I hadn’t been a librarian for that long. The problems are obvious and there for anyone with eyes to see. No one wants to see but librarians, and even if they did see there’s nothing they could do about it. The problem is systemic to academia and it’s tied to the tenure process. Professors want to publish in the best journals they can to get tenure or gain a reputation. They have every incentive to keep publishing in the top journals and no incentive to published only in open access journals or low cost journals. There are journals libraries "must" have, and enough libraries will get them to keep the system going. The entire academic tenure system in the United States would have to change its goals and incentives for the "serials crisis" to end. That’s not a change that will be driven by librarians.

I want to compare this to another systemic "crisis" in academia, the rapid and continuing decline of tenure track jobs in the humanities. This article in the Chronicle of Higher Education and this one in the NYT are the most recent thing I’ve seen on the issue on the very off chance it’s unfamiliar to you.. The underlying causes are different. The overproduction of of humanities PhDs for 40 years is driven by many causes, but the result is the same. There are too many PhDs for the jobs available. Everybody knows it. Everybody complains about it. Nobody can do anything about it. And no one in power wants to, anyway.

I’m also reminded of an encounter from my days at a liberal arts college. I was the liaison to the English department among others, and one of the English professors once requested the library purchase a very expensive microfilm set to support a portion of her research. I would have liked to, because she seemed to be doing some interesting work. But it was much too expensive for our budget and I had to turn her down. Visibly frustrated, she complained that the college expected her to do research, but couldn’t pay to support that research. This is an issue William James called the PhD octopus, and Jacques Barzun recognized as the drive in academia from the 1940s on to make sure that every institution of higher education from research universities to junior colleges had PhDs teaching the courses. The PhD is a research degree, and once upon a time wasn’t necessary to teach undergraduates, especially lower level undergraduates. But colleges wanted PhDs to seem more important and compete with others. 

Traditionally, liberal arts colleges focused on undergraduate education. In practice, they still do. But their professors are now required to research like professors at research universities without the support. It’s a systematic issue. Everyone knows about it. People complain. No one cares. And if they do, they can’t do anything about it anyway. When you have hundreds of PhDs competing to teach freshman composition, then there’s a problem with the system. However, once more it’s a systematic problem built up over decades, not one that can be easily solved. 

This is also why despite my frustrations, I don’t blame the vendors. For the most part, they’re not acting unethically just because they act contrary to the morals and desires of librarians. Librarians want to provide people with the information they need. Vendors want to make money. To paraphrase Adam Smith, it’s not from the benevolence of Elsevier, Ebsco, and Sage that we expect our journals, but from their regard to their own interest. They’re not necessarily evil or unethical, but they don’t operate by librarian standards. To keep expecting them to, and to be frustrated when they don’t, is a problem with our expectations rather than their practices. Watching some librarians try to deal with the behemoth vendors as if they have the same values as librarians reminds me of Dr. Johnson’s saying that marriage after divorce is the triumph of hope over experience. 

Keeping that in mind, we still get some value for our money or we wouldn’t be working with the vendors at all. It would be very expensive for libraries to deal separately with every publisher and impossible for them to host online content individually in the way vendors can. Barbara Fister pointed out that in an informal survey a lot of librarians were happy with Ebsco. If we were really that unhappy, if we weren’t getting value for our money, then we’d do things differently. The time might come when that happens, but I suspect the vendors would know when that was happening and would adjust accordingly. A dead addict can’t pay for a fix.

Meredith had a follow-up post wondering whether some organization on our part could battle this "Goliath." ACRL? Tried weakly and failed, though they helped educate a lot of librarians on the issues. Consortia? I don’t see it happening. Consortia are there to negotiate prices and deal with vendors. When it comes to the painful and likely impossible decisions that would have to be made to solve this problem, consortia are only as strong and willful as their individual members, and in my experience will balk only at systematic outrageousness, not at something as relatively minor as one journal becoming much more expensive. It can happen. I saw it happen last fall as one vendor proposed a ridiculously high price increase for a consortium. In fact, "Dealing with the Pusher Man" was an adaptation of an internal ema
il I sent arguing against accepting that deal. The vendor attempt fell through, but it was because the price hike was so outrageous as many libraries were cutting funding that it just wasn’t possible. Vendors know when they’ve pushed libraries to the brink, so they pull back, all with the goal of maximizing their profit. 

I think dealing with increasing costs and the loss of control that comes from accessing information rather than owning it is one of the most serious ongoing problems for academic libraries, both for budgeting and preservation issues. Other than fight guerrilla battles here and there as circumstances permit, there’s not much we can do about it, though, because while it’s one of the most serious problems for libraries, it’s not one of the most serious problems for academia. Libraries don’t drive research; research drives libraries. We’re just the research support arm of an academic Leviathan. We can do our best to understand the issues and explain them to others as necessary, but until most faculty and university administrations think there’s a huge problem, libraries can do very little. Even if it was viewed as a major academic problem, the root causes would have to be addressed over a period of years or even decades to begin solving it.

So what can be done? Very little, and it’s not our fault. I suspect there are other issues that will overwhelm higher education long before librarians’ serials crisis becomes a truly academic crisis. Already we can see the warning signs. The liberal arts and sciences are losing ground in higher education to be replaced by professional programs that people will pay for because supposedly they will get jobs. We’ll see more programs in business, education, nursing, maybe even librarianship, and geared to training practitioners rather than training future researchers. This intersects with more trends in higher education: the increasing reliance upon adjunct labor, the slow disappearance of tenure-track jobs, and the rise of distance education (at the moment aimed mostly at professional degrees or practical training). Adjuncts teaching 4/4 loads won’t be doing much research or publishing.

What will a world of higher education modeled on the University of Phoenix look like? There will be fewer doctoral programs, especially in the liberal arts and sciences. Thus, there will be fewer graduate students to train. With the decline in graduate enrollments, there will be less need of research professors to train the grad students as they engage in their own scholarship and publishing. Thus, there will be less scholarly publishing and less demand for scholarly journals. Instead of the proliferation of esoteric and hyper-specialized titles we’ve seen in the past few decades, we could instead see a reversal where there aren’t enough specialists to support those journals. 

As higher education remakes itself into a marketable, profit-driven exercise in pragmatic job training, the problems we see now will gradually disappear, no doubt to be replaced by new problems that we also can’t solve. All we can do is educate ourselves, explain our cause, and lookout for skirmishes we can win. And maybe hope, because sometimes hope does triumph over experience. 

Probably for the first time since starting this blog, I received an email from a publicity person touting a blog post that I actually thought worth reading. Others of you may have received this entry from the Oxford University Press blog: Amazon Fail 2.0: Bookseller’s Big Brother removes Orwell’s Big Brother from Kindles everywhere, by Dennis Baron. In full disclosure, I don’t really know Professor Baron, but I did take a seminar from him my first semester of graduate school – introduction to the teaching of rhetoric. I recall writing an essay arguing that the concept of plagiarism arose during 18th century intellectual property disputes and was inherently capitalist, and thus all the Marxist rhetoric instructors out there shouldn’t be bothered by the practice of plagiarism. But all this is irrelevant prelude.

Baron argues that we should beware giants such as Amazon and Google because even though they do much to promote literacy, they do so at the price of privacy and control of our information. I completely agree. The essay was inspired by the recent Kindle mini-scandal, where some Kindle users found bootleg copies of 1984 removed from their Kindles and their $.99 refunded. Probably no literate person has missed at least one headline in the past week or so linking Amazon to Big Brother. It seemed at least an irony too good to pass up.

As I’ve written before, I’m no fan of the digital rights management or intellectual property restrictions on the Kindle. Ebooks are great in many ways, and I read them regularly on various devices, but for library purposes Kindles are too controlled by the company to be reliable, and for personal use I still refuse to buy (perhaps "buy" would be better) a book that I can nether lend nor give nor sell to another person. Kindles have their uses, but they go against the grain of readership since the beginning of writing – if I may make so bold a statement – in that they deliberately and effectively deter the possibility of multiple readers of the same item. Besides which, it’s obvious that DRM is a finger in the dike preventing the free flow of digital information and will always be thwarted somehow.

However, despite my reservations about the Kindle and DRM in general, I can’t jump on the Big Brother bandwagon (nor am I accusing Professor Baron of doing so). The actions of the federal government seem to have more and more Big Brother characteristics these days, but it’s inappropriate to apply this description to something like Amazon.

First of all, we all have to be citizens of our state unless we opt out somehow and immigrate. However, we do not have to use Amazon or the Kindle. I am unaware of any situation in which someone was coerced into using the Kindle or giving up the history of their reading habits to Amazon. Amazon knows so much about us because we let it know so much about us. We willingly let Amazon see what we buy so that it can recommend yet more entertainment for us. This is much closer to the hedonistic and shallow Brave New World than it is to the dark dystopia 1984. Regardless of the contracts saying they’ll own a digital copy, Kindle users know how much control over the Kindle content Amazon has, and if they didn’t before they do now.

Contrast this with the music digital downloads from Amazon, freed by the music companies from the extremely restrictive DRM of the ebooks. I’m sure there’s some information embedded in the digital files saying I purchased specific songs from Amazon and that could be used against me if suddenly everything I purchased ended up on some file sharing site. Below that point, though, the files are mine, and Amazon can’t take them away from me. I can copy and back them up as many times as I like. I can give them to other people if I wanted, and they could play them without unlocking. Theoretically, I could even charge other people for these files, if I could find someone stupid enough to buy them from me. (Note to the Amazonian Big Brother: I would never do anything like this. Really.)

Despite the apparent irony of 1984 disappearing, there’s nothing Big Brothery about any of this. When it comes to Amazon, we are the victims of our own desire for easy shopping and entertainment. There are undoubtedly times when corporate malfeasance completely out of control damages our lives. Actually, that pretty much happens everyday somewhere. But this is not one of those cases. We willingly comply with Amazon, as we do with Google itself, handing over our privacy for the opportunity fondling their shiny baubles. Situations like this might erode our trust in Amazon, and thus we might be less willing to shop there, but that would still be our choice.

People who do anything on the Internet should know there is no guaranteed privacy anymore. The Internet is filled not with Big Brother, but with millions of little brothers gathering random details of our online life and using them for their own advantage. When this practice is ubiquitous, to pretend as some people have been doing that Amazon is in any way specially or specially evil is just duplicitous or naive. Or maybe it just makes a good headline.

The ACRLog had a short piece this weekend on librarians and open access. Barbara Fister mentioned reading in Current Cites about a U. of California study noting the discrepancy between the words and deeds of faculty when it comes to information access, then trying to link out from Current Cites to another possibly interesting sounding article from the Journal of Academic Librarianship and finding a shopping cart. When I tried it, I got the article, but that’s because it seems to be written into our library’s charter that we subscribe to everything no matter how much an individual publisher might gouge us. (Not that I’m saying Science Direct gouges us.) She rightly wonders “Why do so few librarians bother to put our words into action? Maybe because it’s work? Maybe because nobody says you have to? Maybe because we’re hypocrites?”

This problem has bothered me for a long time. I’ve never been on the tenure track, so I’ve never had a requirement to publish. If I write something, it’s because I want to write it. Since I don’t do anything even remotely related to social science or statistics, there isn’t much discursive space in the library literature for me anyway. Regardless, years ago I decided that whenever possible I would write only for open access library journals. As an academic librarian who has discussed these issues with professors and tried to promote the idea of open access, I have also wondered why so few library journals are openly accessible.

That includes the offerings from the ALA. American Libraries isn’t openly accessible. I don’t often read it, because I read almost no journals in print now and going through the member signup page and navigating Ebrary isn’t worth the trouble. It especially bothered me that the ACRL publications weren’t openly accessible, though that seems to be changing. C&RL is mostly accessible now. When I visited the site for the current issue, I saw a notice about full text articles: “The full-text of these articles are available to current ACRL members only. You will need your password to access them.” But they were all available without my password. Maybe there’s a category of article not available.

Back to Fister’s question, why don’t we put our words into action? I suspect it’s for the same reason most other fields don’t. If one has to publish to keep one’s job, and publishing in the most respected journals is the best way to impress people, then that’s where people will try to publish if they can. Why take a chance on Library Philosophy and Practice or E-JASL when you can publish in standard journals like the Journal of Academic Librarianship that people have heard of. I suspect that fear keeps people from changing, the fear that publishing in a little known journal won’t look as good come review time.

There is one silver lining to this cloud. At least library journals don’t cost $10K a volume.