Scholarly Communication, Monetary Networks, and the Control of Knowledge

Since its inception EMOB has examined access to various commercial databases and related issues concerning the production and distribution of knowledge in our digital age. As an academic blog, EMOB employs a form of social media to engage in scholarly discussion and exchange. Recently as the co-authors of this blog, we both received emails asking us to verify our profiles for the ACI Scholarly Blog Index to ensure accuracy and completeness and, in turn, to expand the reach of our blog. We were told that “[a]s gratitude for completing your Author Profile, you’ll receive free access to premium features in the ACI Scholarly Blog Index for your own research needs.”

The invitation itself as well as the promise of “free access” to premium version and tools prompted some investigation. I had been following discussions of Academia.edu, ResearchGate, and other social communication networks for academics, and the ACI Scholarly Blog Index seemed to promote itself in similar ways—especially in terms of assisting scholars and promoting their work as well as the spread of knowledge.

A commercial entity but free to search,the ACI Scholarly Blog Index describes itself as follows:

ACI Scholarly Blog Index is an editorially created and curated index of scholarly social media. Authors are selected for inclusion based on their academic credentials as well as the scope and quality of their writing. Metadata, taxonomies, and proprietary Author Profile Cards are appended to each publication. An elegantly sophisticated search interface easily surfaces highly relevant articles. Post-search filtering allows researchers to further hone in on appropriate articles. ( ACI Scholarly Blog Index)

Using the line, “You know us by the company that we keep,” ACI identifies its “allies” as LexisNexis, ProQuest, and Thomson Reuters and asserts, ”This is our time. This is the Age of Research, Powered by Social Media” (ACI).

ACI’s choice of “regime” to herald its presence is telling–and perhaps quite apt given the word’s meanings and connotations. “Regime” is typically defined as either a kind of government associated with authoritarian rule or a “system or planned way of doing things, especially one imposed from above” (Oxford Dictionaries). While there is no question that scholars today are working in a very different era from even just a few decades ago, what is still up for question is how much control we have and will have over the production and distribution of knowledge. The new ways in which knowledge is being commodified does often seem as if we are operating in a new regime in which the exchange of ideas and ownership of scholarship have shifted from the control of academics to commercial entities.

That ACI’s abstracts of scholarly blogs are now “indexed in EBSCO Discovery Service, ProQuest Summon, and OCLC WorldCat” indicate the inroads that ACI Scholarly Blog index has made since its establishment within the past year or two (ACI). At this point, libraries seem to be the most acquainted with this new tool, and ACI has been making the circuit of various library and information science conferences for over a year now—and possibly longer. It also crops on university library websites as part of “new database trials,” and LYRASIS, a nonprofit organization whose members are library and information science professionals, is offering a 20% discount to subscribe to ACI Scholarly Blog Index, though a cursory search has not turned up the subscription fees for the premium version and its tools (probably a sliding fee based on several factors).

While the ACI Scholarly Blog Index is not the same as scholarly communication networks such as Academia.edu, ResearchGate, and Mendeley (which was purchased by Elsevier for £65 million in 2013), some of the concerns about these academic networking sites increasingly being expressed are arguably relevant. As most know by now, Academia.edu, although founded by Richard Price, who earned a doctorate in philosophy from Oxford, and bearing an the domain name “.edu”, is nevertheless ultimately an entity funded by venture capitalists. Similarly, ResearchGate, which bears the domain “.net”, is also funded by venture capitalist monies as well as funding from Bill Gates of Microsoft fame.

A few weeks ago, David Matthews, a Times Higher Education (THE) reporter who covers, among other topics, the relationship among businesses and universities wrote a thought-provoking article on the topic, “Do Academic Social Networks Share Academics’ Interests?” (THE April 7, 2016). As his title indicates, the piece questions whether such scholarly networks are truly serving academics and draws attention to potential problems and detrimental effects their commercial foundation poses.

Matthews’s piece is certainly not the first to raise such questions. Many EMOB readers may have seen Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s blog post “Academia, Not Edu” that appeared last October (Planned Obsolence.net October 26, 2015. While Matthews covers three academic social network sites, Fitzpatrick focuses on Academia.edu. That ResearchGate is far more popular among those in the sciences and social sciences is no doubt one reason for her doing so. As the Associate Executive Director and Director of Scholarly Communication at the Modern Language Association, Fitzpatrick urges scholars of literature, English Studies, and foreign languages to put their energies into building MLA Commons, established about four whose partial purpose resembles Academic.edu’s ostensible misison with multiple other benefits including arguably the key boon of being controlled by scholars themselves.

Similarly, Janneke Adema, a member of the Centre for Disruptive Media, posted the full text of her piece “Don’t Give Your Labour To Academia.edu, Use It To Strengthen The Academic Commons” on her blog on April 7, 2016, after a portion appeared in conjunction with Matthews’s article on the THE website. Adema served as chair of the one-day “Why Are We Not Boycotting Academia.edu?” Conference, organized by the Centre for Disruptive Media held 8 December 2015 at Coventry University and who featured the following participants: Pascal Aventurier (INRA, France) Kathleen Fitzpatrick (MLA/Coventry University, US) Gary Hall (Coventry University, UK) David Parry (Saint Joseph University, US). Not surprisingly, Fitzpatrick was among them.

Finally, this issue has been attracting attention beyond the confines of academic communities. In a December 17, 2015 digital post on the The Atlantic, Laura McKenna wrote an essay on “The Convoluted Profits of Academic Publishing” . While its title offers little indication, the piece focuses heavily on Academic.edu. It offers both the concerns noted here as well as the ways the site has enabled scholars from countries without the resources to purchase the necessary books and databases access to the world’s search. McKenna also discusses Price’s plans to “improve the accuracy of the peer-review process” and other innovations he hopes to bring to academic publishing.

While the above discussion overviews the growing interest in questioning digital tools and sites created for scholars and the academic market, it does not address fully what’s at stake. Control over ideas and publications and who can access this material represent crucial issues being questioned, but these issues are not the full story. Will these sites be erroneously seen as replacing existing, more traditional tools before the function of these tools have admittedly become obsolete? My co-author’s department was approached by her institution’s librarian for English this past week inquiring whether the MLA Bibliography should be cancelled. Clearly, someone thought such a tool was no longer needed. While MLA Commons may eventually incorporate or host this work, that has yet to happen. (I am not oblivious to the fact that question about retaining the MLA Bibliography arose because of financial pressures!). Equally concerning is control and access to the data that the use of these sites and tools are amassing. With the increased emphasis on the impact one’s research has in broader quarters, data on hits, access, and more could become increasingly important in evaluating scholars, their productivity, influence and more. Many academics themselves are already using the analytic features of Academic.edu and the like for such purposes (disclosure–I have on occasion), and the information can admittedly be valuable. While we already lack at least some transparency about the collection of such data, more questions and concerns would certainly arise if this information was under commercial control.

In short, do we want to harness the digital era and its many opportunities to benefit knowledge production in as many ways possible, or will we be content to work with the strictures accorded by a new regime of scholarly production, communication, and distribution?

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Academic Credibility and Commercially-Run Scientific Journals

While EMOB typically focuses on issues and databases associated more with the humanities, we have on occasion discussed scientific commercial databases–often in terms of the unwieldy control they exercise and the exorbitant subscription fees they charge. In a post several years  ago “The Big Bundle Steal: Open Access and Subscription Databases”, we discussed how some scholars in the scientific community have been working hard to find other avenues that will wrest control from these large firms and place that control back into the hands of those in the academic community.

In this context, EMOB thought it might mention a situation that has recently transpired in Australia involving the country’s leading academic medical publication.  When the  journals division (AMPCo) of the Australian Medical Association decided to outsource the production of its renowned Medical Journal of Australia to the hugely powerful mammoth Elsevier, its equally well-respected editor, Dr. Stephen Leeder protested that “working with Elsevier was ‘beyond the reach of my ethical tolerance'” (Sydney Morning Herald 4 May 2015). As a result, Leeder, who had not been informed about the decision to outsource until it was a done deal (The Guardian, 4 May 2015) was fired by the AMA from his role as MJA‘s editor.  In response 19 of the 20-member editorial board have resigned. While the ultimate fallout over AMPCo’s decision to retain Elsevier and dismiss Leeder remains to be seen, Australian academics in the field are predicting that scholars will shun the MJA.  Accusations of Elsevier’s launching “fake” medical journals (ones that appeared too closely aligned with major pharmaceutical firms)  in 2009 seemed  to have already caused many to question its credibility.  Maybe problems of credibility, more than outrageously high subscription fees, will prove to be the price that is finally too high for  the academic community to pay.

The Big Bundle Steal: Open Access and Subscription Databases

In previous posts we have addressed access to subscription databases. Several recent news items offer a timely reason to revisit the subject.

On July 19, 2011 the New York Times reported the indictment of twenty-four-year-old Aaron Swartz, one of the forces behind the Open Library Project and longstanding internet activist, for breaking into the JStor database and downloading over 4.8 million articles. The material downloaded represented close to JStor’s entire holdings. On several occasions Swartz’s surreptitious activity caused some of JStor’s servers to crash. Once Swartz returned all the hard drives containing the documents and promised not to redistribute them, the nonprofit online journal provider expressed no interest in pursuing legal action. JStor issued its statement about the case the same day that the New York Times’s article appeared. The return of the material to JStor, however, did not alter the government’s stance toward the situation. As United States attorney, Carmen M. Ortiz, noted, “Stealing is stealing, whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data or dollars. It is equally harmful to the victim whether you sell what you have stolen or give it away.” If convicted, Swartz could face a 35-year prison sentence and a fine of one million dollars.

Swartz undertook the downloading while he was on a ten-month fellowship at Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics—a situation some may view as ironic and others as indicative of his strong commitment to open access for all information. Many have viewed the charges as over-reaching by the government, with some regarding the indictment as retaliatory for his internet activism as well as indicative of a lack of understanding about the digital environment. How could Swartz’s actions be called “theft” when the material remained on the JStor server? Isn’t this a matter of simply copying files? At the most wouldn’t his actions more appropriately fall under copyright infringement (although this scenario is complicated by the unwillingness of JStor to press charges)? That Swartz had legitimate access to JStor through his position at Harvard and that he conducted the downloading through unauthorized access of M.I.T.’s servers raise additional questions about illegal actions as well as his motivation. Was his purpose to analyze large data sets as he has in the past? (An explanation many have suggested, yet, as Michael Widner ponders in his recent ”JStor, the Semantic Web, and Bibliopedia” post, what aim could Swartz possibly have had in downloading so much content “that could not have been served via JSTOR’s Data for Research (DfR) API”?) Or did Swartz intend to make the JStor content freely available as the indictment, without citing any evidence, asserts?

A number of blog posts and other online articles have offered opinions about and analysis of the case, but Maria Bustillos’s post on The AWL (3 August 2011) offers a well-balanced look at the case. Besides providing valuable legal context and rejecting the possibility that Swartz would want or need to use JStor’s Data for Research for data analysis, she also helpfully distinguishes between nonprofit journal providers such as JStor and for-profit commercial enterprises such as Reed Elsevier. As Bustillos reminds us, costs, often significant, are involved in digitizing academic journals and maintaining reliable access to them. She also usefully clarifies that

JSTOR is paid (not by the public, but by institutions) for a service, not for content. The money that individuals pay for these articles goes not to JSTOR, but to the publisher that is making the material available.

I would add that a portion of the modest fees obtained by some scholarly societies from licensing their copyrighted journal and annual publications to JStor help defray their publishing costs, keep members’ dues down, and even on occasion provide funds for graduate student travel and scholarships. Bustillos rightly notes that JStor offers free access to nonprofit entities across Africa and other parts of the developing world. On its website JStor states that it furnishes over 600 institutions in the developing world with free access; its factsheet supplies some specifics and also announces the launch of a new alumni-access program. This announcement seems a welcome development and suggests that JStor is responding to a consistent complaint about access being withdrawn upon graduation from an institution.

Yet I should stress that this EMOB post is not meant as a paean to JStor. Like Bustillos, I believe that JStor should arrange for free access to the public domain material it provides. Rather this post is an effort to draw attention to the distinctions between nonprofit providers and for-profit providers of online materials. Indeed, I second Bustillos’s hope that “[i]f the Aaron Swartz case clarifies the position of open access advocates with respect to nonprofit services like JSTOR, that at least will be a good thing.”

JStor provides access through bundling—the practice of selling online access by assembling a number of journal titles as a package that libraries purchase for their patrons. Yet not all bundlers are alike, and it does seem odd to me that Swartz decided to copy JStor’s collections as opposed to those of other bundlers. In a 2008 piece, “Collection Sales: Good or Bad for Journals?”, Mark Armstrong evaluates the practice of bundling in terms of its effects on the journals (as opposed to readers). While he sees bundling as positive practice for journals, he does not see bundling by commercial publishers as salutary for nonprofit journals and interestingly sees JStor as a possible model that nonprofit journals may wish to emulate:

In the historic regime of stand-alone journal sales there was little tension when a nonprofit journal was published by a highly commercial publisher. Now, though, there is a tension, and non-profit journals might benefit from gradually disentangling themselves from the more commercial publishers. Both for-profit and non-profit journals, however, should surely make full use of the powerful instrument of bundling. In particular, relative to any stand-alone sales strategy, a non-profit journal will be better off if it joins the collection sales programme of a noncommercial publisher. The current example of JSTOR, which distributes a collection of largely non-profit journals (with a lag), might be a possible guide for how to disseminate the current output of non-profit journals. (21)

In the footnote that closes this paragraph Armstrong further explains,

JSTOR (www.jstor.org) distributes a large number of journals from several disciplines, with a preponderance of non-profit and society journals. Articles are distributed with a lag of several years, so as not to unduly cannibalize a journal’s library subscriptions. JSTOR is available to libraries on a bundled basis (with scope for libraries to choose only particular subject areas). Since JSTOR has always distributed collections rather than individual journals, there is no issue about basing its library prices on historical individual subscriptions. JSTOR is a non-profit enterprise and sets relatively low prices to libraries, and pays relatively low prices to participating journals for distribution rights.

Ted (Theodore C.) Bergstrom, an economics professor at the University of California Santa Barbara, has been studying academic journal pricing for more than two decades, and his work supplies an additional context for assessing the differences between for-profit and nonprofit journals and the practice of bundling. In a co-authored 2006 article that appeared in ”Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment” [4.9 (Nov. 2006): 488-495], he and Carl Bergstrom compare “The Economics of Ecology Journals,” and their findings seem to be in keeping with larger trends. One of the several graphs they furnish affords a visual view of the stark pricing differences and citation costs of journals published by for-profit entities, by commercial and scholarly partnerships, and by nonprofit publishers (p. 489).

Figure 2. For-profit publishers (yellow) charge institutions more per page for journal subscriptions than do non-profit publishers (blue), such as scholarly societies and university presses. Journals published jointly by scholarly societies and for-profit publishers (red) are typically priced intermediately. Solid lines indicate linear regression through the origin (Non-profit: slope = 0.25, r2=0.67. Joint: slope = 0.86, r2=0.83. For-profit: slope=l38,^=0.90. Note that the regression slopes are not equal to average prices per pages, because the latter effectively weights each journal by its size.) From Carl T. Bergstrom and Theodore C. Bergstrom, Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, 4.9 (Nov. 2006): 488-495, p.489.

As the authors explain, this chart shows that the

average cost per recent citation for journals published by non-profit societies is $0.78. Journals published jointly between a scholarly society and a for-profit publisher cost on average $2.42 per recent citation and those produced by for-profit publishers without an affiliated society cost on average $433 per recent citation (Figure 2). Thus, whether we measure cost as price per page or price per citation, for-profit journals are approximately five times as expensive as their non-profit counterparts.

Given that one of their findings reveals that the “price differences between commercial and non-profit publications do not reflect an underlying difference in quality as measured by citation rate” (488), the cost-per-citation analysis should cause serious pause.

Bergstrom’s ongoing work with other collaborators in the Big Deal Contract Project charts the stranglehold that for-profit outfits such as Elsevier and Springer have held over academic libraries. Also notable are the widely different fees that libraries might pay from one of these providers for the same material. A posting on a 2009 talk Bergstrom gave at the University of Michigan reports that “as an aside, almost, [Bergstrom] tells us that while UMich and Illinois pay Elsevier about $2.25M for the “Freedom Collection”, Wisconsin pays about $1.2M for the exact same collection.”

Bergstrom has consistently concluded his articles with suggestions of how to address the various problems stemming from commercial publishers’ bundling practices. In the previously cited 2006 ecology article, he and his co-author stress that faculty should not abdicate purchasing decisions to librarians, noting that librarians depend on faculty and graduate student input in making such decisions. They forcefully conclude

The fraction of library budgets that is currently going to the shareholders of large commercial publishers could instead be used to provide services of genuine value to the academic community. Professional societies and university presses could help by expanding their existing journals or starting new ones. Individual scholars could advance this process in many ways: by contributing their time and efforts to the expansion of these non-profit journals, by refusing to do unpaid referee work for overpriced commercial publications, by self-archiving their papers in preprint archives or institutional repositories, and by favoring reasonably priced journals with their submissions. (495)

Over the years Bergstrom has adjusted his recommendations to address the shifting landscape effected by the ever-increasing move to digital access. In his 2010 essay “Librarians and the Terrible Fix: Economics of the Big Deal” essay, published in Serials, 23.2 (July 2010): 77-82, Bergstrom presents an array of possibilities. In this piece he now sees merit in the “sale of institutional site licenses for non-profit journals” (80). As he explains, unlike commercial entities that have made the most of price inelasticity [that is, when an increased price “results in a less than proportionate decrease in demand”—a situation Bergstrom describes as “a paradise for monopolists” (77)], “[n]on-profit institutions have no incentive to charge prices significantly higher than average costs, even if demand is price inelastic” (80). Moreover, he emphasizes that libraries should engage in hard bargaining with commercial publishers who charge prices that far exceed average costs. Nor should libraries be afraid of abandoning entirely the “big deal” if not satisfied with the price. Although he acknowledges that libraries should make their own decisions about the refusing the big deal, Bergstrom encourages such action by offering successful examples. Stanford’s and Cal Tech’s decisions to forego overpriced big deals exemplify prestigious research institutions who have benefitted from this stance.

Evidently more libraries are doing just that. In “Libraries Abandon Expensive ‘Big Deal’ Subscription Packages to Multiple Journals” (The Chronicle of Higher Education, 17 July 2011), Jennifer Howard reports on efforts by the University of Oregon library and other Oregon academic libraries as well as those by Southern Illinois University at Carbondale to abandon or fiercely renegotiate the “big bundle deals” offered by commercial publishers such as Elsevier, Wiley, and Blackwell and to return to purchasing individual subscriptions.

As this discussion has indicated, the big bundling deals that have received the primary criticism are those provided by commercial publishers such as Elsevier, Springer, and the like. As Bergstrom observes, “[A] library that signed its first big deal contract [with Elsevier] in 1999 would be paying 80% more in 2009 than it did in 1999” (79). Moreover, while Elsevier and Springer increased their 2010 subscription rates in 2009, numerous non-profit societies either froze or reduced their prices in response to widespread library budget reductions (79). Especially in light of ongoing financial cuts, that almost half of university library serial budgets is spent on these big bundle deals should concern us all. Open access is an ideal for which we should strive, but JStor does not seem to be the kind of villain in this larger narrative of access and bundling that some responders to Swartz’s case have painted it as being. According to JStor’s factsheet, “Since our launch in 1997, JSTOR has never raised archival collection fees for participating institutions. In addition, because we have added new content to each collection every year, users have access to more content for the same fee.” Frankly, I am puzzled by Swartz’s choice of bundle.