Reflections on the "Harvard Mandate"

On Tuesday, February 12th, the Harvard University Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) approved a motion that requires Harvard's FAS researchers to deposit their scholarly articles in an open access (OA) repository to be managed by the library. Faculty who wish to opt out can obtain a waiver, which would need to be requested for each instance. At this time, the mandate does not apply to Harvard's professional schools (such as Business, Law, Medicine, Divinity, Education, and the Kennedy School), though Harvard University's Librarian Robert Darnton intends to promote the idea widely. The mandate apparently applies only to scholarly articles and not at this time other types of faculty created works.

The required language (for example, in publisher agreements) that will enable authors to post to the repository now being created has been described as "a nonexclusive, irrevocable, paid-up, worldwide license [for a faculty member] to exercise any and all rights under copyright relating to each of his or her scholarly articles, in any medium, and to authorize others to do the same, provided that the articles are not sold for a profit." Faculty members will retain their copyrights in the articles and are free to publish in journals that will accept such a license.

Stuart Schieber, the computer science professor at Harvard who made the motion and has been advocating for some time, described the motivation as: "It should be a very powerful message to the academic community that we want and should have more control over how our work is used and disseminated." In a statement released following the vote, Shieber cited serials costs that have "risen to such astronomical levels," forcing cancellations and "reducing the circulation of scholars' works." He also noted that many publishers will not allow scholars to use and distribute their own work.

A few thoughts about the implications of the Harvard "mandate":

1. Harvard University will incur a moderate cost (creation of article repository infrastructure including technology, support, legal advice, and compliance management), along with some long-term benefit (extent of effect on teaching and learning transformation is so far unproven)

2. The PR factor has already been significant, as Harvard is the first leading US institution to take such action. The PR-visibility factor was initially promoted in Raym Crow's paper, "The Case for Institutional Repositories" (2002). In it, Crow posited that a principal purpose of the IR was to serve as a "tangible indicator" of an institution's quality and to demonstrate the relevance of its research activities, thus increasing the institution's visibility, status, and public value (administrative aggregation).

3. Faculty, generally very careful to assert their ownership over their own works (and court cases in the US have confirmed that faculty work in academia is not "work for hire," a concept reflected in most university ownership policies), have via this action given Harvard permission to utilize their works.

4. The mandate does not give to faculty Web posting rights that they did not mostly have from publishers already. That is, it appears that authors already have permission from 96+% of publishers to mount their own works (see SHERPA/RoMEO Project at http://www.sherpa.ac.uk/romeo.php); author action rather than publisher permission has been the barrier. However, the Harvard mandate and repository do force the issue on campus.

5. We can expect potential, though undefined, pressure on other institutions to follow suit.

6. This action adds to the growing pressure on publishers to adjust their business plans in important ways, as part of (1) an increasing practice on part of authors to put work up on the Web; and (2) a growing number of mandates; and (3) the general acceptance of "this is what you do on the Internet." These business adjustments are in a continuous state of evolution.

6. Version control and proper authority citation will become even messier than they already are!

7. In spite of the stated desire to impact on serial prices, this mandate is unlikely to have any effect. Prices are more likely related to growth in size of STM literature and the supporting services, structures, and value-adding that publishers of all sorts are providing.

8. In spite of the mandate, there will be no reduction in costs to universities; rather, as a result of various factors such as repository support, growing number of funder mandates and compliance issues, and the growing practice of research institutions to be asked to cover the costs of online publication through publisher options such as "open choice," "open access" or other means, the costs to research institutions will certainly increase. No library subscription dollars will be saved.

9. The argument that such online article repositories, particularly in STM, will benefit poor countries is not correct. At this time, most STM publishers do have "give-away" programs to developing nations. Through programs such as HighWire's, nearly 2 million articles are available without restrictions worldwide. United Nations programs such as HINARI, AGORA, and OARE, currently make nearly 8,000 peer reviewed journals in STM fields freely available to nations with a per capita income of under $1,000 per year. (A YouTube video describes HINARI/AGORA/OARE and their impact.)

In short, this mandate, with its high visibility, certainly adds to the growing perception that online content from academic scholars and researchers can be made freely available. While doing so, it leaves for all of us as many questions open and unanswered as we had prior to 12 February.

The electronic monograph: a case study

These paragraphs opened a discussion on liblicense-l this week and are self-explanatory, arising from my own thoughtful reaction to some news that had crossed my desk. (The archive and subscription information for liblicense-l, which I moderate, may be found at http://www.library.yale.edu/~llicense/mailing-list.shtml)

Recent news postings in Library Journal and the Chronicle of Higher Education tell a somewhat confusing story about Gutenberg-e, the online series publishing worthy books by younger historians. Begun under the leadership of Robert Darnton when he was President of the American Historical Association, it was grant-funded and published by Columbia University Press. As near as one can tell, the sequence of events is something as follows:

1. Nearing completion of its funded run of publications, frustrated that the series was getting few subscription customers and little recognition for scholarly content, Columbia Press negotiated to have the series become part of the Humanities E-Books project led by ACLS. The Humanities E-Book site lists twenty titles in the series and at present offers access to 6 of them. This is a subscription series, typically paid for by institutional (library) subscriptions. All the articles and releases cited below seem to agree that the fundamental business model of the series was not working.

2. On 1 November 2007, volumes in the series were also made available for open access through the project's own site, www.gutenberg-e.org. Twenty-three titles are available there, with "Open Access Terms and Conditions" rather heavier on restrictions on use (e.g., one printed copy only per user, no multiple copies) than one associates with OA projects. The page bears a Columbia University Press copyright

3. On February 12, 2008, the American Historical Association issued a press release entitled "Gutenberg-e Books Now Available Open Access and through ACLS Humanities E-Book". Deep in the press release, Robert Townsend of AHA expressed concern that the series had not been financially successful.

4. At the end of February, both LJ and CHE published articles emphasizing the new open access, but containing some indication of the financial challenges the series had faced. In response, the director of Columbia University Press, Jim Jordan, wrote a cryptic blog entry http://www.cupblog.org/?p=99 in which he sought to clarify some facts of the case, somewhat distancing himself from the open access version of the project, which he reports as hosted by the Columbia libraries.

5. The Columbia University Libraries website does not make it easy to find the Gutenberg-e titles. The one time I succeeded in finding a page (yesterday: going back to write this note I was unable to locate it), the page was clearly marked as a subscription-only series accessible on the site only to Columbia users. However, a Google search does find a free site.

I'd welcome any clarification and corrections of this outline of the facts I've been able to uncover. Will all the titles of Gutenberg-e be included in the Humanities E-Book series? Will the open access version continue indefinitely? Are the two versions identical? How should we best represent these titles in our online catalogues?

Ann Okerson
Yale Library

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The first response came from CU Press director Jim Jordan, courtesy of listmember Sandy Thatcher:

Dear Ann Okerson:

My post was meant to question the characterization in the original Chronicle article that the Press had "radically restructured" Gutenberg-e to take it open access. The implication, at least to me, was that we had abandoned the subscription model rather than moving the project to the more successful subscription-based Humanities eBook database. I did not want to leave the impression that we felt open access would in the long run better serve the authors' ambitions for having their work read, used, and reviewed. The best we can say is that we do not know.

Some time ago we recognized that the subscription site for Gutenberg-e was simply not drawing the traffic we expected and needed for the project to be sustained. So with the success of the ACLS project, it made much more sense to combine these projects with theirs. The Gutenberg-e authors are better served by having their work discoverable in that much larger and more widely used database, and linked to the deep resources available there. Both sites will eventually contain the complete works and we will continue to promote the availability of these projects in both places through advertising, press releases, and outreach to journal editors.

I am certain the Columbia Library is committed to maintaining the Open Access site but I defer to my colleague Kate Wittenberg on questions relating to that site and its functionality.

Jim Jordan 3/6/08

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From the project itself, Kate Wittenberg then responded thus:

Ann: I hope you don't mind if I share some personal thoughts about the Gutenberg-e project, as I am concerned that some important issues may have gotten lost in the flurry of press surrounding the recent decisions regarding distribution of the digital books. As you know, I have been involved in this project from the start, and I wanted to share some of my thoughts looking back at the project from this point near its completion. You may share some, all, or none of this with your colleagues and readers as you think best.

Gutenberg-e was created as a bold experiment to explore whether peer-reviewed, born-digital monographs by young academics would alter the way in which historical scholarship is presented, whether the scholars would received the same professional credit for these publications that they would receive from work published in print, and whether the project would permit publication of monographs that would otherwise be turned down for financial reasons by university presses. The long-term business model for this enterprise was not the main focus of the project, although we did always hope that there would be a way to receive sufficient revenue to allow for the maintenance, and possibly the continued development of the series.

This project has a long and complicated history that includes many exciting breakthroughs as well as a number of significant challenges. The authors involved are courageous and innovative scholars, and in my view represent the best of the next generation of historians. A number of them have created completely new models of author/publisher collaboration in the scholarly communication process, as well as new models of historical scholarship and narrative. The authors who have come up for tenure have received it, with their Gutenberg-e book being their major publication. Most of the e-books have been reviewed positively in distinguished history journals.

In complex research projects that are managed by multiple organizations, agendas and missions sometimes get confused. The fact that a decision was made to have the e-books distributed through the ACLS E-Humanities publishing project, while maintaining them in their original form on the Gutenberg-e.org website hosted by the Columbia University Libraries, is not a condemnation of the project as an economic failure. Rather, it is a creative solution to stabilizing and ensuring the availability and preservation of these works over time. If, in the future, the Press, the Libraries, or some new organization that does not yet exist takes on the mission of publication of digital scholarship in history, the Gutenberg-e series will be made available, as appropriate, through this project as well. The point is that we have broken new ground, learned a tremendous amount, provided a group of scholars with beautifully designed and produced publications, and offered a new model of university press/library/information technology collaboration in scholarly communication. These are findings that few would consider a failed experiment and that instead offer valuable models and knowledge for others.

Kate Wittenberg
Manager, E-Publishing Programs
Center for Digital Research and Scholarship
Columbia University

Paying Author Fees for "Open Access" Publication: Two Models

Many models for funding and supporting greater and more open access to journal articles are emerging, as institutions and publishers seek to find the ideal balance of rights, costs, and access. One main development of the last few years has been emergence of "author-pays" models of open access publishing. That is, for a fee up front from the author or the author's institution, publishers will allow free access to the article even to non-subscribers.

That much is fact. What I see happening now is the emergence of a new kind of institutional response.

The group of institutions (listed and linked below) is stepping up to pay for the author fees for the faculty and researchers in their institutions. Typically they help those authors (1) who don't have grant funding or other external source to tap, (2) with a capped fee at a certain standard amount, and (3) when the author agrees to ensure that there will be un-embargoed open access posting of the article as a result. In some cases, these funds have come direct from library budgets, in others from a partnership between library and e.g. ITS or a vice provost for research. Though a couple of these may be in their second year of operation, it's fair to say that they are still pilot projects, experiments in the possible. Institutions where we know this to be happening include:

• University of Wisconsin: http://oscp.library.wisc.edu/response.html#libraries
  
• Amsterdam University (with 150,000 Euro/year set aside budgeted): http://www.uba.uva.nl/open_access/publish.cfm/
  
• UC Berkeley: a pilot program sponsored by the UL and Vice Chancellor for Research: http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/brii/
  
• University of North Carolina Chapel Hill Library (subsidies for those without grants): http://www.hsl.unc.edu/Collections/ScholCom/OAFundAnnounce.cfm
  
• University of Nottingham UK (not out of periodical budget): http://www.biomedcentral.com/info/about/openaccessfund

Those models work "retail;" that is, by funding articles and authors on a case-by-case basis.

A second, "wholesale" (and far more intriguing) model is underway in the type of contract that has been agreed between Springer Verlag and the libraries of the Max Planck (Germany) Institute. As part of this new 2008 site license contract with Springer, MPI has negotiated agreement that all MPI authors will have their Springer Open Choice fees completely waived. Springer is said to have made similar arrangement with two other European libraries (one in the Netherlands and another in Germany).

What this suggests is that consortia and libraries increasingly will be asking for similar language in their license renewals. The downstream implication is that whatever business model underlay the shift to author fees will be strained and revised to accommodate the incorporation of the fee arrangement in a larger site license conversation. In the early stages, by waiving such fees, Springer may have a competitive advantage with authors, but if or as other publishers agree to similar terms, this advantage will be short-lived. And if a critical mass of publishers agrees to such fee waivers, then what next?

Library Services for Students Abroad

Every few days this winter, one or another of our elite universities has been grabbing the headlines with new ways to enrich the student experience, whether with financial aid programs that will diversify and support a stronger student community, or most recently, with Princeton, a new initiative to transform education itself. The details are yet to be worked out, but Princeton speaks of a pre-freshman year abroad (what the English call a "gap year" between secondary school and university). They will send up to 10% of their students overseas (a couple of hundred?), supporting them with financial aid as needed.

Such a program raises all sorts of interesting questions, but surely points the way ahead to a time when many if not all college students make some kind of for-credit study abroad part of what they expect of university life – sometimes in advance of actually setting food in a campus classroom. Now I don't mind remembering the old Monty Python routine about the "news for parrots" (you can google this term and find the short video on uTube), making fun of the tendency of everyone to see the big events of the day in terms of their own parochial interests: so I don't mind asking the question, "how does this affect the work done in college and university libraries?" Princeton will have special issues (for example: Do pre-frosh count as students and so do they get the same access to licensed electronic resources as other students? How will they be trained to use the University's various resources before disappearing over the horizon?), but the wider issues are ones of community and the place of libraries in the communities.

What services will our students need as they roam more widely than ever from home base? Will they need different content? Different forms of access? Different forms of support and instruction in the use of tools? And what will be the various roles of faculty and librarians in helping them maintain robust connections back home? I can't help but seeing this not only as an important responsibility for libraries, but also as an important opportunity – to be the institutions on campus that send out robust tentacles across the planet, linking our students (and of course our wandering faculty as well) to home base as well as the intellectual communities we support.

What are other libraries doing about these emerging "global" support issues?

Rationalizing Low-Use Print Collections

Every six months (January and June) at the American Library Association conferences, the Chief Collections Officers, representing some 40 major libraries, gather in sessions casually called "Big Heads," to discuss issues of the moment. We prepare for the meeting with detailed institutional reports that we share among ourselves. Several items from those written reports will be highlighted in this blog.

For example, at last month's meeting, I was forcefully struck by the innovation coming, once again, from Ohio's libraries. Our colleague Jim Bracken, who has the amazingly wonderful title of Associate Librarian in Charge of Actually Figuring Out What the Heck To Do Next – well, actually he's called Assistant Director, Collections, Instruction, and Public Services – reported about an OSUL proposal to OhioLINK for building a multi-institution repository for journals, a "Journal Service Center," where the total number of copies of commonly held print journals will be winnowed down, services and access will be provided as needed, and where the security and preservation of the "last copy" in a common repository will offer an important resource while allowing real cost savings.

This is very much in line with at least two other initiatives: CRL's print repository programs (Distributed Print as well as Other Journal Archives) and ) and the RLG/OCLC Shared Print Collections Program . More and more of our attention will now go to numerous details to be sorted out in thinking through how libraries will consolidate, de-duplicate, and winnow print collections. How can we be effective stewards of what we inherit and preserve, while at the same time avoiding the buildup of large offsite collections of unread and unaccessed and inadequately preserved materials.

So here's Jim's posting describing the journal project. What do you think about it?

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“Journal Service Center: New Model for Access in OhioLINK”

OSUL has proposed that OhioLINK create a Journal Service Center to serve OhioLINK patrons and libraries. Our vision is development of a shared journal collection where a permanent archival run of journals would enable us to provide one-day on-demand document delivery service to all our patrons. In addition to the archival copy, a second copy of each title would be maintained for the purpose of allowing patron-initiated circulation directly from the Center. This would provide new, improved access to journal literature throughout OhioLINK while creating a cost-effective archive specifically for journals in our state. A Journal Service Center would allow libraries and depositories throughout Ohio to withdraw their holdings of duplicated and infrequently-used titles. All OhioLINK member libraries could contribute their holdings on a voluntary basis to the Journal Service Center which would enable them to re-purpose space in their local libraries and regional depositories. The Center would determine whether the copies are needed and dispose of unneeded volumes. OhioLINK members could weed their collections with the assurance that volumes held at the Center will be retained as a permanent archival copy and rapid access to this material will be available. Lack of space is a perpetual issue for all libraries and widely held journal titles consume thousands of feet of shelf space. For example, Nature is held by 59 OhioLINK institutions. At OSU, one complete copy of this title takes up 78 linear feet of shelving; retaining only two complete runs of Nature at the Center would theoretically free a total of 4,212 linear feet of shelving across the state. By consolidating all of the duplicate titles across the state in a Journal Service Center, newly freed space could be made available without the need for additional local capital expenditures. We see the Center as an open-shelf browsable collection intended to provide a high level of access and enhance preservation of shared journal resources in Ohio. OhioLINK members would share in the cost, ownership and use of the Center.

Jim Bracken, Ohio State University Library

Happenings in the back rooms of research libraries

Libraries are noisy places these days: not for what goes on in the reading rooms, but for what goes on in the back rooms and admin offices, where our times are full of exciting and sometimes controversial possibilities. This blog will report intermittently some of the things that cross my desk as Associate University Librarian for Collections and International Programs at Yale. From this wealth of traffic, I'll select the postings and messages and announcements that seem to me most provocative, that point ahead in interesting ways, or that need real thinking in order to make them happen. At every point, comments from readers will be welcome, and I hope that from our mutual contribution of time and thought, some useful discussions will occur.

Ann Okerson/Yale University Library