Crisis, Paralysis, and Progress | Peer to Peer Review

abernard102@gmail.com 2014-05-23

Summary:

"It is not quite accurate to say that academic libraries have been paralyzed in the face of massively escalating costs from commercial publishers. All of us have engaged, out of necessity, in cancellations and cutbacks, although the impact of those cancellations on our budgets has been minimal. Publishers have just raised prices elsewhere and implemented new purchase models that have absorbed an ever-growing portion of our collection budgets. Monographs purchases have been curtailed and services constrained as we pour more and more money into the maw of commercial journal publishing. What we have not seen so far is any kind of concerted effort to break through this cycle. One reason for this has been fear of antitrust laws. Libraries almost certainly cannot organize boycotts of the worst offenders amongst academic publishers, although individual libraries are free to cancel packages and to explain their motivations publicly. In this regard it is interesting, however, to see that many of the faculty we serve are not so constrained. The multiple boycotts of Elsevier by authors and reviewers, the law professors who have announced their intention to boycott Aspen casebooks, and the faculties that have supported library decisions to cancel 'big deals' all indicate that faculty authors are as fed up as librarians, and more willing, perhaps, to act aggressively. Two growing movements—the push toward open access and the growth of library publishing programs—make me think that we may be reaching a tipping point. The open access movement, which has grown right alongside but largely independent of the journal crisis language, is not really about directly undermining commercial subscription. It has the far more important goal of raising the awareness of authors that they own a valuable asset in the copyrights to their works, and that they can and should manage that asset to their best advantage. This realization is a necessary but not sufficient condition for breaking the stranglehold that commercial publishing has on academia. The second phase of a real revolution in scholarly communications is the movement of library resources from the consumption side of scholarship to the production end. Libraries have begun this shift by making publishing services part of the value they provide to their campuses. Open access—more responsible copyright management—is now often accomplished through library-supported repositories, online journals, data curation services, and digital collections. In all of these activities, libraries are beginning the process of moving resources toward directly producing and disseminating scholarly resources, recognizing that this movement offers a better return on investment than more traditional ways of spending our money. Slowly the movement toward library-based publishing is gathering steam. The recently organized Library Publishing Coalition just held its first Forum, at which incipient and well-developed library publishing efforts could exchange ideas and information. But another big step has been taken toward coordination of library publishing—or, to be more accurate, toward the shift of resources toward the non-commercial production of scholarly resources, by a proposal described recently in Inside Higher Education. In a white paper released last month, library administrators Rebecca R. Kennison and Lisa R. Norberg describe the need for “deep structural changes” in the systems through which scholarship is created and communicated. I honestly do not know if their proposal is the one that will trigger these changes, but I know that they are pointing us in the right direction. A dramatic reorienting of our spending toward the production of scholarship, which they propose to accomplish through widely distributed contributions to a shared fund and competitive grants awarded to support new experiments and reform older models, is what is needed ..."

Link:

http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2014/05/opinion/peer-to-peer-review/crisis-paralysis-and-progress-peer-to-peer-review/#_

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » abernard102@gmail.com

Tags:

oa.new oa.comment oa.publishers oa.business_models oa.reports oa.prices oa.cancellations oa.budgets oa.libraries oa.universities oa.librarians oa.gold oa.green oa.lca oa.advocacy oa.boycotts oa.petitions oa.signatures oa.up oa.repositories oa.hei oa.journals

Date tagged:

05/23/2014, 16:34

Date published:

05/23/2014, 12:34