Scholarly Communication Disruption and Transition

1. Scholarly CommunicationDisruption and Transition CS 502 – 20030416 Carl Lagoze – Cornell University Acknowledgements: Les Carr Herbert Van de Sompel MacKenzie Smith

2. “Disruptive Technologies” • C.M. Christensen. The Innovator’s Dilemma: When new Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail. Harvest Business School Press, 1997. • Failure of established organizations to adopt and react to new technologies • Current success and quality is not a predictor of the future • Characteristics of disruptive technologies • Initially underperform established products • Enable new applications for new customers • Performance improves rapidly

3. Encyclopedia Britannica • Two centuries of tradition as the most scholarly and complete of English-language encyclopedias • Confronted with lower quality but more accessible and cheaper CD-ROM encyclopedias • Business model collapsed almost instantly

4. Small, uniform author & reader community Authors and readers often the same Reliance on volunteerism and “community responsibility” Short-term readership interest Diverse and relatively large author & reader community Distinction between authors and readers Money and fame are motivating factors Interest often persists Scholarly Communication vs. Popular Publishing

5. Why do scholars publish? • It is the tangible product of our work • Our funders expect it – big publication lists always look good on reports • It is our responsibility to our colleagues • It is good for our egos • It is the/a key to tenure, promotion, and hiring

6. In a world ruled by “publish or perish,” what perishes first, it turns out, are trees and library budgets. Policy Perspectives: To Publish and Perish

7. funding funding proposal research results paper writing promotiontenure notoriety journal submission peer review publication How the system works

8. Who are the role players • Scholars • Faculty • Researchers – Commercial, Academic, Government Labs • Publishers • “Big” for-profits: Elsevier, Kluwer, Springer-Verlag • Learned and Professional Societies • ACM, APS, AMS • Publishing operations often subsidize other operations • Some are hard to differentiate from for-profit publishers – e.g., IEEE • Libraries • In paper system the sole distribution point for publications

9. Scholarly publishing is extremely hierarchical Premier Sources Second Tier Might as well be “People”

10. Twin Peaks Problem Harvards Impact Access Have-Nots

11. Issues and Changes • Exponentially increasing amount of information produced by scholars • Growth in both dimensions • Horizontal • Increased specialization • New and more specialized journals • 5000 peer reviewed journals in education research • Vertical • Diminish single source reliance • Facilitate multi-uses for single source • Compressed time for “relevance” of results, increased demand for rapid delivery

12. Broken Economics

13. Some reflections on subscription prices • Average journal subscription price has gone up 7-10% over the past 10 years • Some journals have gone up 20-40% of the past 5 years!!! • Some journals cost 5K-10K per year • Many societies have raised subscription prices 20-25% over the past several years • “Catch up” to the private publishers • Fund research into digital initiatives • Cover the rest of their operations • Elsevier’s price rise per year equates to one less faculty member per year (according to Bill Arms) • http://www.library.cornell.edu/scholarlycomm/index.html

14. Assumptions in current scholarly publishing system • Publications are difficult to produce • Publications are difficult to distribute • Readership is by closed community • Archiving and management is by closed community

15. Some “side effects” of the current system • Rich get Richer! • Global scholarly divide worsens • Research institutions in developing countries can’t afford subscriptions • Intellectual capital flees • Hierarchy gets more stratified • Unpublished papers disappear • Entry into the system is difficult

16. Per article costs and revenues Acks. P. Ginsparg

17. Where are the costs in the print system • Publishers • Copy-editing • Production • Administration of review system • Production • Distribution • Libraries • Cataloging • Preservation • Binding • Shelving

18. What do these economics tell us? • Distribution in electronic system is basically free • Fundamental assumption of paper system is eliminated • “Publishing” by everyone should be encouraged and supported • Services need to be disambiguated from distribution • Free distribution doesn’t mean that there isn’t an economic model • Systems like review, filtering, awareness can be built on top of a free distribution system

19. Acks. P. Ginsparg

20. What are the implications of this model? • A marketplace of ideas • People choose appropriate entry points into the system • Troll for free at the lowest layers • Pay for guided entry at upper layers • Money can be made for synthesizing information • Standards for interchange amongst layers are important (e.g., OAI-PMH)

21. Signs of Change - Readers … there’s a sense in which the journal articles prior to the inception of the electronic abstracting and indexing database may as well not exist, because they are so difficult to find. Now that we are starting to see … full-text showing up online, I think we are very shortly going to cross a sort of critical mass boundary where those publications that are not instantly available in full-text will become kind of second-rate in a sense, not because their quality is low, but just because people will prefer the accessibility of things they can get right away. Clifford Lynch 1997

22. Signs of Change - Publishers • Electronic versions of existing journals • Licensing arrangements to libraries • http://campusgw.library.cornell.edu/cgi-bin/dj.cgi?section=ejournal&URL=SerialsSearch • Problems • License bundling • Inflate costs and maintain economic model • Force libraries to subscribe regardless of interest • Longevity dependent on license continuity • Specialty portals • Scirus (http://www.scirus.com)

23. Signs of Change - Publishers • Electronic Journals • D-Lib Magazine – http://www.dlib.org • Journal of Digital Information (JODI) – http://journals.ecs.soton.ac.uk/jodi/ • Journal of Electronic Publishing (JEP) – http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/ • The economic models are not established

24. Signs of Change – Publishers and Libraries • JSTOR • http://www.jstor.org • Recognition of reality • Archival journal storage is expensive for libraries • Shelf space crisis forces libraries to choose between • Keeping archival issues to serials • Continuing subscriptions for new issues • Building expensive new buildings • Archival copies have limited economic value to publishers • Cooperative non-profit model among publishers/foundation (Mellon)/libraries • Sliding window to digitize old issues of serials and provide ready access services

25. Signs of Change – Libraries & Professional Societies • HighWire Press – http://highwire.stanford.edu • Realities • Many professional societies and journals are “Mom & Pop” operations • Technical and economic cost of electronic publishing is often prohibitively high • Solution • Highwire acts as a brokering service to provide electronic publishing technology for small professional societies and journals • Pooling technology allows creation of higher level services (e.g., reference linking amongst journals)

26. Signs of Change - Scholars • Eprint respositories • Author-self archiving gives scholars control over their intellectual output • Harnad’s “subversive proposal” • Direct descendant of traditional pre-print sharing in print form among scholars • Examples • arXiv – http://arxiv.org • ePrints – http://www.eprints.org • California Digital Library scholarly publishing archive - http://repositories.cdlib.org/ • Related Issues • Publisher agreements – some journals refuse to publish anything that has been posted as an eprint

27. ResearchInspiration Publication … Revision … … Revision … TeX Preprint Reprint E-Prints: Publishing Timeline An article is not a single event. Technical Report Conference Paper Journal Article

28. Signs of Change – Computer Scientists • Automatic creation of traditional journal services • ResearchIndex – http://researchindex.org • Selective web crawling to gather CS resources • Heuristics and AI techniques to establish services • Searching • Reference linking • Research in automatic reviewing techniques • Collaborative quality filtering • http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~tracyr/project/ • Scientometrics • Paper ranking by citation analysis

29. Signs of Change – Institutional Repositories • Institution-based • Scholarly material in digital formats • Cumulative and perpetual • Open and interoperable • DSpace (http://www.dspace.org) • Institutional Repository for MIT faculty’s digital research materials • MIT Libraries - Hewlett Packard Research Labs collaborative development project • Open Source system • Federated system • Preservation archive

30. DSpace Technology - Standards-based • Modular architecture, well-defined APIs • 100% open source • Programmed in java • RDBMS and SQL for metadata • CNRI “handles” for persistent identifiers • X.509 certificate-based access control • OpenURL linking • OAI-PMH for exposing metadata

31. DSpace Technology Stack • Apache, Tomcat, OpenSSL/mod_ssl • Java 1.3, JSP 1.2, Servlet 2.3 • PostgreSQL 7, JDBC (rdbms) • CNRI Handle System 5 (persistent ids) • Lucene 1.2 (index/search) • Jena (RDF History system) • JUnit (testing), Log4j (logging) • HP/UX, Linux, Solaris, etc.