I think we need to make some distinctions. I agree with Tamara - for the
delivery of "reading", licensed e-books are a positive library
experience. They don't require a physical visit to the library, they
cannot be "stolen", they don't require physical space, and a library can
ramp up and ramp down the number of copies to meet demand. This pertains
to non-research libraries who do not serve as cultural archives.
Eric is speaking of licensed scholarly materials. Research libraries do
serve as the keepers of scholarly output. Those materials are published
by some of the most greedy publishers on the planet. Licensing or not
licensing unfortunately does not change that. Yes, there have been some
interesting negotiations and there is a rise in open access materials,
but the underlying issues are copyright and capitalism.
Yes, the $$ comes out of the library's budget. But the library comes out
of the university's budget. I don't know why so many institutions do not
understand (and desire to fund) the service that the library provides,
but that is key to the problem. I suspect that often the library and the
administration are not working well together.
What the U of California discovered when it threatened to stop licensing
was that the big barrier was the faculty. Especially the junior faculty.
Without those very expensive and prestigious publications they could not
get tenure. None of the open access journals would get them there, and
non-publications, like arXiv, don't count at all. It's a kind of
ouroboros, and it's hard to know where to break the cycle. The faculty
need access to the journal so they can further that area of knowledge,
then they need to publish in the journal to prove that they are
furthering that area of knowledge. The solution there was to mandate
that all scholarly output be deposited in a repo, and that was somehow
negotiated with the publications. But the publications are still the
means of career furtherance and tenure. As long as that is the case, the
cycle exists. Somehow the members of the academy are going to have to
participate in the solution.
kc
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/Movement_Charter/Content/One-page_draft>
On 8/28/23 4:31 AM, Eric Lease Morgan wrote:
We -- librarians -- have choice, and I believe we ought to exercise it to a
greater degree.
IMHO, libraries are about a synergistic combination of collection,
organization, preservation, and dissemination of data, information, and
knowledge. Libraries are not about one or the other of these things but their
amalgamation. None is more important than they other. Collections without
services are useless, and services without collections are empty; one without
the other is like the sound of one hand clapping.
The amount of money our profession spends on access is much greater than the
amount of money our constituents would be willing to pay. If students,
researchers, or scholars had to pay for content on a per-article basis, then I
believe students, researchers, or scholars would find alternative ways to
disseminate and acquire their materials. If the costs are not worth it to them,
then why should the costs be worth it to us? Put another way, I do not think it
is not our responsibility to fund the scholarly communication process. We have
choice. We are not legally obligated to license materials. Nor are we morally
obligated. Try out this scenario. Figure out how much you pay in license fees
for the Forestry Department. Pay the fee this year. Next year, give the
Forestry Department the money, tell them it goes for licensing, and offer to do
the work. The Forestry Department will sing. The year after that, when the fees
to up, and the same about of money is given them, I predict they will say it is
not quite worth it, and they will take some of the money to fund labs,
personnel, etc. If it is not worth it to them, then why should it be worth it
to us? Scholarship will not go down the toilet if we -- librarians -- stop
licensing access, nor will libraries become obsolete.
I'm not naive. For majority of time libraries have existed, access has been restricted in one way
or another, but the restrictions have been less about money and more about politics, knowledge as
power, and secrecy. Even today, archives restrict access to their materials for privacy reasons.
Even collections such as the Code4Lib Slack channel archives are not accessible to members because:
1) members are not channel administrators, and 2) other members have not explicitly opted in to
having their postings shared. Information wants to be free? Well, we need to qualify the
definitions of "information" as well as "free". Again, I'm not naive.
It is our self-imposed responsibility to preserve the historical record. As per LOCKSS,
"Lot's of copies keep stuff safe." While publishers are not purposely being
malicious, we -- librarians -- are unable to preserve the scholarly record if it exists
in only one place. As far as those perpetual access contracts go, let's demand a practice
run. Give us some of the data that we might be granted when the publisher might go out of
business. Will it be in a form we can actually use? WordPerfect? Microsoft Word? DocBook?
TEI? PDF? A password-protected zip file? If those companies go out of business, do you
think they are going to set aside money to dissipate their content?
--
Eric Morgan<emor...@nd.edu>
Navari Family Center for Digital Scholarship
University of Notre Dame
--
Karen Coyle
kco...@kcoyle.net
http://kcoyle.net
