ReadCube offers New Per-Article Access for Expensive Journals

There is an article in the business section of today's Boston Globe about a new start up called Labtiva, and the product is ReadCube Access. Started by two graduate students at Harvard, the service currently provides access to the Nature journal suite of titles. So far, University of Utah is the only partner, but they are rolling it out in the chemistry department this fall to test it.

There is some concern among the administrators at Utah, according to the article, about the pricing of the program and how it may eat up library budgets. The arrangement is like ITunes, in that DRM will allow the individual subscriber only to access the individual article. The article cannot be printed and cannot be shared with others. Articles can be accessed on a limited time basis for $6 or less (depending on the journal), or purchased for $11 or less, depending on the journal. Rick Anderson, interim dean of University of Utah's J. Willard Marriott Library is quoted,

Our journal collection is very, very lean, ... If we opened something like this up across the campus, you’d be taking a very big risk that your entire materials budget would get blown out in a month, ...

Anderson goes on to analyze a potential danger, not only to university budgets, but to the publishing industry in the model. He also compares the model to ITunes, and draws a parallel to the music industry's experiments with music delivery and DRM. Currently, libraries must purchase an entire journal's worth of articles to obtain the single article that is exciting the research community. That will change with the ReadCube Access model, which would address that market inefficiency. But it would drastically change the financial picture for publishers, who will face the same market upheaval currently shaking the music industry.

There is also a brief mention of the Open Access movement, though it is dismissed as a fringe movement. (Directory of Open Access Journals)

Scholars' Journal Boycott: Open Access Rebellion

On January 21, Cambridge University mathematician Timothy Gowers posted on a blog, griping about the publisher Elsevier (and others). He did a very nice job listing the problems that librarians have complained about as consumer issues:

1. It charges very high prices — so far above the average that it seems quite extraordinary that they can get away with it.

2. One method that they have for getting away with it is a practice known as “bundling”, where instead of giving libraries the choice of which journals they want to subscribe to, they offer them the choice between a large collection of journals (chosen by them) or nothing at all. So if some Elsevier journals in the “bundle” are indispensable to a library, that library is forced to subscribe at very high subscription rates to a large number of journals, across all the sciences, many of which they do not want. (The journal Chaos, Solitons and Fractals is a notorious example of a journal that is regarded as a joke by many mathematicians, but which libraries all round the world must nevertheless subscribe to.) Given that libraries have limited budgets, this often means that they cannot subscribe to journals that they would much rather subscribe to, so it is not just libraries that are harmed, but other publishers, which is of course part of the motivation for the scheme.

3. If libraries attempt to negotiate better deals, Elsevier is ruthless about cutting off access to all their journals.

4. Elsevier supports many of the measures, such as the Research Works Act (112 HR 3699), that attempt to stop the move to open access. They also supported SOPA (112 HR 3261) and PIPA (112 S 968) and lobbied strongly for them.

I could carry on, but I’ll leave it there.

Professor Gowers notes that scholars can fight back by refusing to continue editing for, publishing in or doing peer reviews for such journals. He notes that he has stopped doing these things in Elsevier journals and encourages others to do so. I notice that his post has received 31 comments to date, and 83 people have used Google to +1 it, 614 people have shared it on Facebook, and 778 have tweeted it on Twitter, so this is a very hot post.

Gowers wondered if there might be a website where mathematicians who want to boycott Elsevier journals could sign their names electronically. Within a day or two, The Cost of Knowledge appeared, providing just such a website. Scholars from a wide variety of fields (law is not listed, but is subsumed under "social sciences") have signed, and are listed in alphabetical order. Science, math and humanities are all represented. The impressive part is that the protesters pledging to forgo publishing in journals such as The Lancet and Cell, include not just "made" scholars, but tenure track junior scholars, who are truly putting a great deal on the line by joining the protest. As of right now (Feb. 8, 3 PM ) there are 4,713 signatories total on The Cost of Knowledge.

The Chronicle of Higher Education has noted the protest and notes that Elsevier has felt enough pressure to make a statement in response. Librarians who look at the article will not be surprised by any of the justifications from the Elsevier spokeswoman: The steep price increases of the 1980's are a thing of the past and are coloring the perceptions of the problem now. Elsevier claims that it invests a lot in metadata tagging that adds value and links articles together, making research more efficient(and that would not be available if the scholars published their own materials -- UNLESS they worked with librarians!).

The company's support of the Research Works Act is driven by its investment in those products, [the spokeswoman] added: "It's not a disavowal of the National Institutes of Health or of open access. We are just trying to avoid inflexible regulations." The company was the first and largest contributor to PubMed Central, the NIH repository of free, full-text articles,....

Mr. Gowers, ... told The Chronicle that researchers can now evaluate and review one another's papers on open Web sites. "That would be far cheaper than anything a commercial publisher could hope to offer, and just as effective," he noted.

Nor does the Elsevier infrastructure impress younger scholars like Mr. Abrahams. "It could disappear tomorrow, and I'd never notice that it's gone," he said.

If I were Elsevier, and other, similar journal publishers, I think I would be worrying a bit.

The Future of Libraries

This trenchant article, "Toward a New Alexandria," published in The New Republic is a call to arms. The author, Lisbet Rausing, a historian of science, envisions a

[N]ew Library of Alexandria ... an archive that contains all the natural and social sciences of the West--our source-critical, referenced, peer-reviewed data--as well as the cultural and literary heritage of the world's civilizations, and many of the world's most significant archives and specialist collections. Imagine that this library is electronic and in the public domain: sustainable, stable, linked, and searchable through universal semantic catalogue standards. Imagine that it has open source-ware, allowing legacy digital resources and new digital knowledge to be integrated in real time. Imagine that its Second Web capabilities allowed universal researches of the bibliome.

Such an archive is technologically possible, and Rausing points to Google Books and the Internet Archive as examples of "remarkable electronic libraries" that are already under way. However, the scope of even these worthy projects is necessarily limited compared to what Rausig envisions for the new Library of Alexandria.

What besides technology is necessary to create a new Library of Alexandria? It must "be built for the long term, with an unwavering commitment to archival preservation and the public good." It should be "largely governmentally funded." It also "needs to be hosted by one organisation that is reputable, long-standing, nonprofit, and exists in a stable jurisdiction," such as the Library of Congress.

Who or what is standing in the way of such an initiative? Gatekeepers, such as scholars and librarians, who have "traditionally gated and protected knowledge, yet also shared and distributed it in libraries, schools, and universities," are obvious culprits. University libraries do not exist to serve the public, even their own alumni; they exist to serve their faculty and students. They do not make available to the public their "'core' research materials" or other "closed academic databases." Publishers are also obvious culprits standing in the way of a new Library of Alexandria, relying as they do on copyright to lock up valuable materials from the public and charging exorbitant rates to universities to buy back research produced by their own faculty members.

Rausing points to signs of hope, such as the growing number of open-access journals and the increasingly robust repositories of faculty scholarship mounted by many universities. She also challenges libraries to do more, to be "more imaginative." Perhaps we could give alumni lifetime memberships, "develop pay-per-view portals into scholarly resources that are invoiced monthly and electronically? And in doing so could we ... lower prices?" Could libraries "digitize out-of-copyright books on demand and for a small fee ... ? Could university catalogues be turned into blogs ... [by] add[ing] commentaries and hyperlinks? ... Catalogues need to provide reliable URLs, backed by long-term maintenance policies and institutional guarantees. The alternative is to rely on Google's search-engine algorithms, which is to say, on ephemeral beauty contents."

Rausing concludes by pointing to the future:

[Our] children--always on, multi-tasking, mobile--will not engage with a body of scholarship their elders have incomprehensibly surrounded by barbed wire. But they will remain engaged in learning. The question is not whether there will be future scholars. It is how these future scholars will remember and integrate previous scholarship. And in pondering that, which means pondering our own scholarly legacy, it is worth remembering that 'the generational war is the one war whose outcome is certain.'"

Open Access Encyclopedias

Having been involved in an open access database here at Pace Law School, I know from experience how difficult it is to keep it going. Funding is available for start-up ventures, but harder to get for established programs. Even though a database is extremely valuable, users are reluctant to pay for it, especially if it's been free for awhile and they have never paid for it. The sponsoring institution may recognize its value, but not have the resources available to devote to it, especially when there are so many competing demands. How do you maintain a database or other online scholarly project in the absence of regular sources of funding?

This article from Inside Higher Ed provides some insights from institutions that are trying to "build online encyclopedias that are rigorous, scholarly, and free to access." Why even bother with encyclopedias when "journals ... have the cachet of being the frontlines of academic discovery"? According to a librarian at the University of Pennsylvania, "'There is a need to get good verifiable academic information out there,' ... 'whether it's general or specific.'" One of the major roadblocks to producing a scholarly encyclopedia is securing contributors who are willing to write for free "without compromising the rigor of the editorial process." Eugene M. Izhikevich, editor-in-chief of Scholarpedia, "a free, 'peer-reviewed' online compendium" says the way to do this is to "make contributing a privilege." By "playing to [contributors'] egos," a great deal of high-quality material can be secured at no cost. Unlike Wikipedia articles, Scholarpedia articles are credited, and the name of the "curator" of each article appears in a prominent position. This may mean that authorship of a Scholarpedia article will have value during the tenure process.

Even with some free labor, open access encyclopedias need money to keep going. Some encyclopedias have to hire editors to improve articles written by non-native speakers of English. The editors of other encyclopedias want to translate their articles into other languages, and translators do not work for free. One possible "solution" to the funding problem is to induce libraries to pay dues to encyclopedias that are freely available online. This strategy is being sold to libraries "as an investment in open access--a cause many libraries, frustrated by the rising prices of academic journals, have been happy to support." The author concludes that there is no "blueprint for success," and that some projects may not "survive in the long term." Interestingly, "even Wikipedia is beginning to bend under the burden of the free-content model. It recently started running large banner ads asking users to donate money to curb the massive infrastructure costs that come from being the world's fifth most highly-trafficked Web site. It has imposed increasingly strict submission and editing codes, and the rate at which new articles are added has fallen significantly."

Legal Rebel Carl Malamud

It was good to see this laudatory profile in the Legal Rebels series that has been running in the ABA Journal. It celebrates Carl Malamud, who, although not a lawyer himself, has led a crusade "to make public-domain legal materials actually accessible to the public." Malamud founded the organization Public.Resource.org, and thousands of pages of primary authority are freely available through its website. Malamud is currently working to "liberate" and post to Public.Resource.org the Code of Federal Regulations, state administrative codes, and public safety codes, just as he liberated the EDGAR database in the 1990s.

Malamud is also campaigning to be appointed the head of the Government Printing Office. His campaign slogan is "Yes We Scan," and his campaign website includes his prepared statement. In it, Malamud puts forth some of the initiatives he would champion if he were to lead GPO: GPO should lead the way in making federal primary legal authority easily accessible; the Federal Depository Library Program should be redesigned to support librarians better; passports should be designed to better protect Americans' privacy and security; the presentation of federal information on the Internet should be rethought to include cloud computing and upgraded video capabilities; GPO and its operations should be transparent; the public domain should be expanded and protected. The graphic that illustrates this post comes from the campaign website.