I have a humiliating admission to make. Twenty minutes should be more than enough for me to say what I have to say ... I’m delighted to be here in this distinguished company. For those of us in the Upper Midwest, California’s kind of like Oz. Especially Berkeley, and particularly at this time of year. At my home in Madison,Wisconsin, all the leaves are off the trees now and most nights it goes well below freezing, and we’re on something called the Mississippi flyway, so you can hear the geese heading south, even inside your house at night. Makes you feel kind of uneasy, you know they know something. So it was great to get on an airplane ... a long airplane flight is an opportunity to think. It’s true; you get to stop and think for awhile. Actually what I’m thinking about is wondering what you’re thinking because the morning sessions were so good, so stimulating. I know I didn’t get all my questions answered so I hope to reserve some time. I wanted to ask Paul Ginsparg why my physics faculty are so hysterical about journal cuts when this is working out so well. They definitely are. Anyway, I’m going to give you my shortest version of what SPARC is.SPARC is an initiative of the Association of Research Libraries. But it’s been recently opened to all of the academic library community and we’re picking up numbers very rapidly now. We have one hundred fifteen members including an affiliate by the name of SCONUL which stands for the Standing Conference of National and University Libraries of the United Kingdom and Ireland. So we’ve made a wonderful connection to Britain and we’re right on the brink of forming an alliance with the Scandinavian librarians. There are nine founding member institutions in California. Gloria Werner of UCLA was right there in the earliest moments; so was Carla Stoffle (University of Arizona). There are twelve Canadian institutions that are members of SPARC, which is a source of particular satisfaction. I don’t really understand why they joined in such greater numbers than the American research institutions, but I want this mystery to stand in place. I prefer to think of them as the "mysterious Canadians." But I do suspect that this has to do with the fact that this is a much more urgent problem for international research libraries than it is for research libraries in the United States.
We now have several partnerships. One is with the American Chemical Society to produce "Organic Chemistry Letters." Another is with the Royal Society of Chemistry to produce "PhysComChem." Both of these journals will compete head on with some outrageously expensive journals at a fraction of the cost. There was a very interesting letter in "Science" from an editor of "Tetrahedron" saying this is an example of journal proliferation. I thought they ought to take out some irony insurance.
We’ve also formed a partnership to help gain a subscription to something called "Evolutionary Ecology Research." Now, this is a minor initiative but it’s a major story because at the center of it is a scholar by the name of Michael Rosenzweig who created the journal. It became a commercial journal, and he became so fundamentally dissatisfied at the distance between the commercial publisher and what he had in mind in the way of disseminating knowledge, that he quit the journal and pretty much single-handedly restarted the journal, taking the entire editorial board with him. What we often don’t appreciate is that we have captive journals. We have editors and editorial boards that are in a condition of involuntary servitude. Sometimes they’ve even signed contracts, non-competing contracts, that keep them locked into their commercial publishers, and they can do very little about it. So, this is why my favorite example of liberating scholarship of the great opportunities we have before us. It’s not the only one. And there are many reasons why it’s so very difficult to break free.
Some things I’d like you to know about SPARC. This is a very new organization. It wasn’t even an idea until May 1997. It wasn’t organized until October 1997, so we’re just over one year old. We know we’re more smoke than fire. That is to say, the issues we’ve undertaken will not transform the world, but it does give us something to talk about and it does give us a sense of action and that really is the other thing I’d like you to know. This is about collective action by the library community after years of talking about what we might do or could do. This is in fact the third try within the Association of Research Libraries to get some kind of initiative underway, so that we actually do something about the crisis in scholarly communication. And this, finally, is about public information. We understand many of the issues, but even within our own communities there is an incredible lack of knowledge about the essential facts of how the system works and the essential fact that the public sponsors the creation of new knowledge, which is then given away and sold back to public institutions at tremendous cost. This is our mission; it’s fairly straight forward. We propose to lower the cost of information, to advance fair use and other appropriate educational and research uses of information, and improve scholarly communication specifically by encouraging innovation and new technological applications.
The problem is very much still there, and I’ll say a bit more about this. This is very much a present-tense problem. I’m struck by the fact that especially at a time when we’re now seeing some moderation in the price increases from Elsevier, there’s a tendency to begin to use a past tense with respect to the growing and accelerating cost of information. That in fact, many research libraries, even some of the great city research libraries, are receiving substantial budget increases for collections. But there is in fact increasing consolidation in the information market place. We have a new copyright law, and I know there are people within my own community who are very proud of the modifications that were made in that law that were led by the library community. But make no mistake about it; this law’s intended to insure that the public will pay more for information, pay more for more transactions, and it will pay for a longer period of time. We can see this playing out in the commercially-produced digital information that is often more expensive, particularly when there are applications tied in. It is largely a problem of our own making, but that’s been said several times today so maybe that won’t work. After all, the commercial publishers recognized that information had value, that there are emerging areas of knowledge that were not being supported with new journals and that, in fact, there are interdisciplinary areas that could be profitably exploited. They’re doing, after all, what they were made to do. On the academic community side, librarians had acted as apologists for commercial publishers often acting as the on-campus sales force for the commercial publishers. Non-profit publishers stood aside while new products were introduced. And of course the faculty, collectively, failed to take any role in managing the intellectual property they produced.
The next slide I will show you is a list of journals with very high subscription prices. This is, of course, only one of many ways to look at the cost of information. I have learned to be careful about putting this slide up when talking before members of the faculty. They are stunned to learn that journals can be this expensive. They are so aghast that they stop listening for a few minutes. In an earlier presentation, someone mentioned that Nuclear Physics A& B costs $15,000. As you can see from this slide, the cost is actually over $18,000, which gives a sense of how rapidly and drastically journal costs are escalating.
As many of you know, Professor Henry Barschall, an emeritus faculty member in the University of Wisconsin-Madison department of physics, developed a method of measuring the cost of journals per a normalized unit of content. That is, Barschall measured the annual content of physic journals in thousands of characters and divided this cost by the annual subscription price. After Professor Barschall published the results of his study in "Physics Today" he was sued by the commercial publisher Gordon & Breach for "literally false and misleading advertising." It is an incredible story demonstrating the lengths to which commercial publishers will go to suppress information about the true cost of journals. Unfortunately, Barschall did not live to see his work vindicated in an American court of law. Barschall died in February 1997. In August of that same year, the U. S. District Court of the Southern District of New York found in Barschall favor, asserting that:
"Barschall’s methodology has been demonstrated to establish reliably precisely the proposition for which defendants cited it—the defendants' physics journals, as measured by cost per character…are substantially more cost-effective than those published by the plaintiffs [Gordon & Breach]."
When journals are measured in cost per unit of content, a radically different picture of cost-effectiveness emerges. For example, physics journals, which often contain a very large amount of content albeit a large price, are actually less expensive than economics journals, which have even higher prices relative to the amount of content published. So, absolute price isn’t everything, and science isn’t the only area where cost-effectiveness is an issue.
Here’s another way of looking at price and cost. This is cost per use data from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. What we do is we count visible, observed use in the form of browsing. We divide that into the current annual subscription price, and we get horrifying numbers. I’m convinced now that librarians don’t collect useful information because it’s so embarrassing. And this is just a top-end dramatic sample, but it goes on like this for page after page after page. It is staggering.
Let me just summarize some of our observations. Six hundred titles -- actually one thousand two hundred subscriptions since many of them are duplicate -- account for half of all observed use. Just six hundred titles. Twenty percent of the titles account for ninety per cent of all observed use, which means the majority of journals are used less than one hundred times a year, and that we have thousands of titles used less than ten times per year, and hundreds for which there is no observed use at all. It’s an incredible environment. And now I talk about this publicly, and in front of public officials, because everybody ought to know that this is the real situation.
Now, I do understand and appreciate that there are people in this audience who believe that we shouldn’t be evaluating content--journals--on the basis of use. After all, Isaac Newton lectured to the walls. No one really knew quite what he was talking about in his time, so it is certainly possible that breakthroughs in knowledge can be found in resources that are not currently being used. I understand that. But I do think we should perhaps ask questions like what is the opportunity cost of the amount of money that we’re spending on very, very expensive journals that are never used. And I would argue that if we’re going to acquire journals that are never used, couldn’t they at least be modestly priced? Is it possible to create transformative alternatives to the current system? And the answer on the basis of what we’ve heard already today is, yes, in fact it’s, hell yes! And there are very significant signs of hope. Just to mention a couple of them.
We can in fact get by. The CIC is the "Big Ten" universities, basically, and there are one thousand one hundred or so Elsevier titles, right? And this is how many of those titles each of the CIC institutions subscribes to. So, one fact of life here is we can live without some of these journals. We do quite successfully live without them. This isn’t an inelastic market. We can cancel very expensive journals and make it stick. And so there is market pressure, and market pressure is beginning to work. And the alternative by the way, is not interlibrary loan or document delivery. The real alternative is hyperlinking, and the power that hyperlinking is beginning to offer. But more directly to the case, there is Project Muse and the remarkable resource that it offers to us. There is the California Digital Library and all that it promises. There is Highwire. And I am pleased to have this podium for a moment to say that Highwire is perhaps one of the most under- recognized achievements in scholarly publishing of recent times, and that neither Michael Keller nor Stanford has received due credit from the Association of Research Libraries for this extraordinary achievement. If you’ve negotiated any licenses lately and now are negotiating licenses with Highwire, I’m sure you know the difference. It really is a different kind of information environment. They’re the preprint servers, and I would like to know from Paul Ginsparg why this isn’t being replicated elsewhere -- or is it? It might well be.
An easy one is the National Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations. I think this is a very promising initiative because this is where the next generation of scholars is working with the current generation of scholars, and may ensure that new knowledge is born digital, because that’s where we need to be. We need to have a generation of scholars who are accustomed to actually creating knowledge in a Web environment and putting it up on the Web immediately.
We’re on the brink of an agreement with the Institute of Physics of the UK and also the relationship with the Royal Society of Chemistry convinces me that conflicted as they are, the professional societies are the most promising and logical partners for right now. They’re absolutely paranoid about the intellectual property issue. I know that’s the case from working with them. But, that’s not at all unexpected. And they are the people, who since the middle of the 17th century, have the credibility. And without a realistic alternative, faculty and the creators of new knowledge are powerless to do anything but continue to submit to the monopoly holders.
SPARC together with other collective initiatives can enter every market niche where competition is needed. We know now that there are partners out there -- we could go back to that list of the hugely expensive journals -- there are partners out there ready to go head to head with them and to begin to create not so much a radically transformed information environment, but an information environment where change is much more possible.
Another very straightforward thing we can do is refuse to sign licenses that prohibit interlibrary loan. Now, I’m not talking about perfection here. If you’re looking for a gang of virgins, SPARC isn’t it. We know we have to negotiate. We know we’re going to have to make some compromises on the issue of interlibrary loan. But, let me make a few obvious observations. When you give up interlibrary loan, you’re giving up other people’s right of access to information. Most interlibrary loan requests are for material over ten years old, so you’re actually cutting off the flow of information for which the publisher may no longer have any interest or, for that matter, any control any longer. And most importantly, this is not what the creators and sponsors of intellectual property intended -- for it to be locked up in a pay-as-you-go, pay-per-use environment.
We need to continue to work with the provosts and presidents to do two things: 1) affirm a limited public right to use content for education and research and 2) change the reward system so that it is possible to achieve promotion and tenure by publishing in a different venue.
I think we all ought to approach this by considering what’s at stake if we don’t. There’s going to be enormous progress in science over the next decade. The issue is who will be able to participate? In the information model we have right now, we’re going to divide into a community of haves and a community of have nots. The prospect is actually there for us to change our world in this time, and to have a much more democratic information environment, one that is international in its reach, and one that is much more certain to lead the way to new discoveries in the advancement of knowledge.