First Thoughts on Sustaining Scholarly Publishing | Peer to Peer Review
Tweaking the title of the AAUP's new report Barbara Fister, Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN Mar 10, 2011 |
| Photo by Debora Miller |
This spring I have been teaching a new partial-credit course designed to give students a chance to read good books together and explore their own tastes in reading, hoping to lay some groundwork for lifelong self-directed learning. Yesterday I invited faculty from our campus to join my students as we wrapped up our discussion of Rebecca Skloot's book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Part of our discussion keeps coming back to me as I read the new report from the Association of American University Presses (AAUP), Sustaining Scholarly Publishing: New Business Models for University Presses.
Skloot's book is about the woman whose extraordinarily tenacious cancer cells were the first to be successfully cultured. Her family, poor, black, and unable to afford health care, only learned decades after her death that her cells were still alive and had been the basis of significant medical advances and biomedical products. It's an absorbing read and ends with an ethical question: should individuals have some control over how their tissues are used? Ironically, though scientists argued that the progress of science would suffer if donors controlled how their tissue is used, they often hoard their discoveries in order to monetize them. A biologist who joined our discussion pointed out that many advances in biomedical research are spurred by the expectation that commercial applications of the research will lead to profitable products, but those applications are built on a foundation of publicly-funded basic science. The investment we, as taxpayers, make in basic research, may appear to have no economic benefit, but it repays us in unpredictable ways.
Investing in ideas
As do libraries. When we invest in libraries, we do so with the understanding that they are a laboratory for basic learning and discovery. Academic libraries don't ask "how will we bring in enough money to sustain our operations?" and, luckily, we don't have to. Even with increasing calls for accountability, academic institutions don't require that libraries fund themselves. Society supports both basic scientific research and libraries because unfettered knowledge leads to wisdom, and that wisdom will improve our lot in ways we cannot predict with the certainty of business models.
This new AAUP report wisely urges presses to take open access seriously and develop alliances that can help them move from a business model based on selling printed books into something more sustainable. It's a sign that the AAUP is genuinely interested in engaging all of us in dialog that the report carries a Creative Commons license and is open for comment in the Mediacommons platform. However, it starts with some fundamental and arguably false assumptions. The very first editorial urge I had when I started to read Sustaining Scholarly Publishing: New Business Models for University Presses was to strike the word "business" from the subtitle. What scholarly communication really needs is a sustainable not-a-business model. We need to support scholarly publishing as part of the basic research that the world needs, as an investment in the future.
Separated at birth
Much of what university presses do is curiously similar to what libraries do: select, out of all the possible choices, the best information possible, process it, and make it discoverable with metadata and distribution systems. What if libraries paid the salaries of skilled editors and made the discovery, improvement, and sharing of well-edited material part of what libraries do? What if we extended our ethos of sharing through interlibrary agreements to sharing scholarly work with the whole world? What if we took a deep breath and reallocated some staff lines and acquisitions dollars toward funding a new way to think about scholarly communication: a non-business model.
Two immediate responses are likely to be "but we've already canceled everything we can" and "we've just had positions eliminated," perhaps united in a single outraged squawk of "are you out of your mind?"
Setting aside that possibility for a minute, let me confess that not long ago I was impatient when library leaders urged us to become publishers. I value the work of good editors too much to believe we can do without them. I still feel that way. But I am irritated that we are abandoning core library roles—access and preservation—because the commercialization of scholarly publishing depends on limiting access and retaining control through licensing material. In the current system, the business model requires control to make money, but preservation is not in publishers' skill set and too much money and labor on the part of both publishers and librarians is wasted on erecting and then unlocking systems that deny access to anyone who hasn't paid.
Getting out of the business of renting research
So, I've changed my mind. We should become publishers, but to do it properly we would need to add to our staffs the skills we lack. We already know something about selection, project management, metadata, and electronic formatting and distribution. What we aren't trained in is spotting talent in the raw and the editorial work that brings a messy manuscript into focus. We could also probably use some staff skilled in design and marketing, but hey, wouldn't you love to have some of that for your library?
More importantly, we'd have to remember and act on our core values, and that would require making some faculty who expect us to provide what they want unhappy as we reallocate funds. We'd have to think hard about where we spend our time and how to stop doing things so that we can start doing new things. And we'll have to think beyond our campus borders. Once we own the means of production, we must use those means to provide access to all, not just to our faculty, staff, and currently-enrolled students, and that will require a significant change of perspective. We'll have to do all this while still paying for and providing access as we currently do, because what we and our university presses produce is only a part of what scholars need.
But in recent years we've survived just as dramatic a transition in our roles. Think back 20 years. We were getting the first rumors of this amazing new thing: the World Wide Web. Since then we've transformed organizations designed around the ownership and physical storage of printed material into organizations that manage complex systems of digital access. We've reallocated our time and our budgets massively in the past two decades, and in the shuffle we've lost track of some of our core values. But what we learned in the process has made us good at managing change and technologically savvy. It has prepared us to play a more significant role in sustaining scholarship.
We did it before. We can do it again.
Barbara Fister is a librarian at Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN, a contributor to ACRLog, and an author of crime fiction. Her latest mystery, Through the Cracks (see review), was published last year by Minotaur Books.
