four to five minutes so that that should help a little bit
just as i know everybody from this point forward we are being recorded
there's mr Zenelis
on your cue
uh
all right i have 9 30. why don't we fire it up let's broadcast
all right so i believe we're streaming now and
folks are coming in who registered i'm going to give that process a couple
of maybe a minute or so to play out before we
get going
good morning everybody and happy friday by the way
get settled in you brought your coffee i brought mine
and this should be a really uh fun and interesting discussion
so i think everybody's had about a minute or so to settle in
jordan is all have the registrant's been let in
yes sir fabulous all right everybody's with us so good
morning everybody welcome and thanks for joining us this
morning for the virginia sustainable scholarship
virtual forum. I'm Brandon Butler, I'm the director of
information policy at the University of Virginia library
and I'll be moderating the discussion today.
I'm going to start with a few technical notes and suggestions.
One is I suggest using speaker view in zoom there's gonna be between you
know eight and ten panelists at any one time but
most of us will just be watching like you so it won't be fun to see us all at
the same time so pick a speaker pick speaker view and
you'll see what you need to see. Also closed captioning is available.
I want to thank our captioner, Diana. You can choose closed
captioning at the bottom uh of your zoom screen if you if that
would be helpful to you also we are recording uh the video and a
captioned video will be available online from our
libraries after this event is over. So for the last several years
I've been supporting this group of library leaders uh in this forum
as they've worked toward this moment which is simultaneously coming I'd say
about a year earlier than a lot of us thought
but probably 20 years after people started noticing
something was awry with our journal buying system
right so we'll say a little more about that in a moment
but first let me introduce everybody else you're seeing on your screen here.
First we have Carrie Cooper. Carrie is the dean of university libraries at
William and Mary. Bethany Nowviskie is the dean of libraries,
senior academic technology officer, and professor of English at James Madison University.
John Unsworth is the university
librarian and dean of libraries at the University of Virginia.
John Zenelis is dean of libraries and university librarian at George Mason University.
Stuart Fraser is interim university
librarian at Old Dominion University.
Teresa Knott is interim dean of libraries and university librarian at Virginia Commonwealth University.
Tyler Walters is dean of libraries at Virginia Tech.
And I also want to acknowledge
John Ulmschneider and George Fowler who led the VCU and ODU libraries
respectively for the first several years of this group's work and helped lay the
foundation for what we're what we're about to embark on.
So I'm going to say a few words up front to help ground the conversation,
what is this group, how did we get here, and what is the basic issue we're
concerned about, then we'll move into answering some of the most popular
questions we saw in your registration and then finally we'll try to reserve
some time at the end to take questions you ask during the
forum using the Q&A button in the zoom window. It's very likely,
almost certain that we will not get to all of your questions but rest assured
we will keep a record of them and we'll continue to use
your input to inform the way we do outreach.
Also if you're a researcher or any kind of constituent at any of our
institutions we really welcome conversations with you
about all these issues. After this event you can reach out to
any of us or anyone at our libraries uh to set up a time to talk with
somebody about this project. So a little background these seven
libraries have been buying journal big deals together
at least since 2001. Big deals packaged together
all or substantially all of the journal offerings of a given vendor making them
available for a single lump sum price. Since about the turn of
the century these deals have consumed an increasing portion of library budgets
including ours. Since 2016 when we all signed our last
big deal with the vendor Elsevier we've been preparing for a paradigm
shift in our approach to these deals the writing was on the wall back in
2016. We simply could not meet our mission as
libraries in the future if we continue to devote a large and
growing portion of our budgets to just a few commercial vendors and
their big journal deals. So we've started conversations across
our campuses meeting with our presidents and provosts
deans and department chairs researchers grad students and students
to build understanding of this kind of broken system we're going to describe to
you today and that we hope to start the change
we've disclosed key information about our budgets including how much we spend
on these big vendor deals and how quickly that number has grown
over the years we've been building capacity in our
libraries and collaboratively across them to support ways of accessing this
literature without subscriptions we've gathered a
massive data set from multiple sources to help inform our decisions you'll hear
a lot more about all those things as the program unfolds our biggest deal
by far is with the mega publisher Elsevier.
Our current Elsevier contract runs through December 2021
but due to the budget impacts of the covid crisis we've asked Elsevier to start
working with us now on a new approach. We sent them a letter
on Monday and we look forward to starting our
conversations with them. Obviously we can't tell you our bargaining strategy
in detail right but we can tell you that the status quo is unacceptable
and we can share some of the values that inform us as we seek a new way forward.
We can tell you a little more during this event about how we've prepared
ourselves to make a better deal this time than we have in the past
we're pretty sure our friends in Elsevier are watching this forum
or they'll watch it later and we hope they'll take away from it that we're
prepared and even kind of excited to talk to them
about recalibrating a pricing model that we know you know
renewing Elsevier recently compared to throwing a bowl of spaghetti at the wall.
So finally before we get into questions I want to acknowledge some guests we've
invited to join us. The University of North Carolina Chapel Hill
broke up its Elsevier big deal earlier this year
and one of the architects of their strategy Nerea Llamas is with us today
thanks for joining us Nerea.
And the Texas A&M university library is part of a massive new coalition
of Texas libraries and institutions that's currently negotiating with Elsevier,
and David Carlson the dean of university
libraries at Texas A&M is with us today so thanks for joining
us today David. i also want to acknowledge friends in
the audience from Florida State University, the University
of Missouri, University of Maryland, MIT, and the SUNY system all of whom have
been down this road of reforming their approach to the big
journal deals. to the friends and forebears in the
audience we could add a hundred or more libraries universities and even entire
countries around the world who've said enough is
enough the old big deal model is broken they've made this path
much easier for us to follow by walking it ahead of us.
So now I'm going to ask the deans a series of questions based on the
questions that you all submitted in your registrations and the first one
is a big one. What are the values that are guiding our
decisions about big deals and sustainability of scholarship in the
future? and first I want to ask Carrie Cooper to
start that answer.
Thank you Brandon, equitable access is where i'd like to start it is
it is consistent with the ethos of librarianship
as public institutions it is our responsibility to make sure that the
scholarship that's produced by our faculty and staff
is accessible and that it can have the most impact
access to knowledge improves and saves lives
and pay walls are a barrier to that access
and high pay walls are a barrier to that access
one great example is the community's response to covid 19 in the spring when
all of our students were sent home our libraries were locked up
and we saw our research community come
together and bring down those walls and it was quite
remarkable and so we should learn from this crisis
and make equitable access the norm
thanks carrie and so uh john unsworth i want i wonder if you could say a little
bit more about another value that's driving us here
yep sorry just i'm muting myself the thing we all forget to do
i want to begin by talking about diversity in our collections and in
scholarly publication and i'd like to just briefly share a
screen here
to help illustrate a point
so this is a blog post from 2012 by dan cohen my counterpart at
northeastern illustrating what he later comes to call
the wilkins profile this profile is a library specific graph that shows
how many titles in the library's collection are held only by that library
only by a few libraries by many libraries etc
in this visualization a left-leaning library is one with many
unique holdings some of you will be familiar with this idea of john wilkins
or with dan cohen's post about it there are many nuances to the
data but my point in presenting these
visualizations is to say that in general faculty
value uniqueness of course they want what everyone else has
but what should distinguish their own library's collection is that it is
uniquely attuned to their interests and indeed
reflects the history of those interests over time
as with special collections what draws researchers to one library
rather than another will increasingly in an open access future be those things
that are uniquely available in a particular collection
unless you think that this is a notion only for the likes of harvard i
want to present one other screen share just briefly
so this is a slide from a presentation by the project manager for the eastern
academic scholars trust a melon funded monograph retention
consortium that i helped to set up when i was university librarian at brandeis
and part of the boston library consortium
the part of this slide that i want to draw your attention to is the line that
says across this group of 47 small colleges
and university libraries whose circulating monograph collections
totaled altogether about 60 million volumes
which was about the size of harvard's collection at the time
fifty percent of title sets were held by only one library
the title set here means any edition of a title any manifestation of moby dick
in ferberg terms now i know that i'm talking about
monographs and not journals here but i'm also talking about how collections take
shape when they are developed by librarians in
collaboration with faculty rather than designed by publishers
also i'm a humanist and i'm librarian for the whole university so my library's
collection practices have to serve the book people as well as
the journal people and frankly journal prices have driven
our monograph purchases to the margin i'm going to stop sharing
which is to say journal publishers are dictating our monograph collecting
practices now simply because what we've continued to agree to buy
from them is so expensive we need to stop outsourcing our collection
development we need to take our approval plans off
autopilot we need to reconnect with our faculty and be sure that we're building
the collections that they and their graduate students want and
need faculty don't want their libraries to be mcdonald's
drive-throughs where the menu is the same everywhere they want libraries that
have unique holdings that reflect the intellectual heritage of the department
centers institutes professional schools and colleges that make up that
particular university how do we know that
because even in small libraries like those of east who didn't plan together
in any way until east it was clear that before the distorting influence of the
big deal hit their library budgets their collection development
had been surprisingly left leaning in john wilkins terms
in the virginia context all of our campuses support diverse research
interests odu has the state's first library school
virginia tech has great depth on the bench in engineering william
mary has oceanography vcu and uva have hospital and medical education programs
jmu is becoming a phd granting institution george mason was recently
ranked number one in cyber security talent and his tops in criminology as
well these seven campuses don't have a single
shared profile of faculty interest educational emphasis or
research focus we do have a core set of journals that we all need
but that's a few hundred titles much smaller than a bundle of thousands of
journal titles to which we've been subscribing we're obliged to ensure that
no single vendor or small group of vendors becomes entitled to so much of
our budgets that we can effectively serve our
campuses diverse and emerging needs new centers institutes and other innovative
interdisciplinary initiatives need and should have access to the resources
that power their work not only are our profiles different from one another
they're different over time new majors and graduate programs arise
every year and while some are variants on a theme already covered
in our collecting practices some are genuinely new areas of interest
and we need the flexibility to adjust our subscriptions to respond to and
reflect these ongoing changes in our faculty's research and teaching
in short we want the structure of our next deal to acknowledge and support our
local collection development priorities and support our faculty when they
explore new areas rather than having our collections selected and bulk priced by
our vendors supporting small publishers is also a
specific goal of the larger viva consortium
which i have the honor to serve as chair of the steering committee this year
small publishers of all sorts provide an opportunity for new voices and special
expertise and they are often society publishers about which i'll have more to
say later thank you
thanks sean and so finally uh last but very far from least bethany i wonder if
you would add a third value to the list of things that
we have on our minds as we make this transition sure i'd be happy to brandon
good morning everybody so um another of our guiding principles
is that costs associated with access to our
own collective scholarly work should be and i will use a very mild word here
these costs should simply be reasonable and one consequence of having allowed a
monopolistic system to develop around commercially licensed journal bundles
is that the dollar values that our vendors are assigning to these bundles
have truly lost touch with reality not only has price inflation radically
outstripped our own annual budget increases in libraries for
decades the price of the bundles no longer has
any real relationship to the vendor's actual cost to produce
these digital journals nor does it correspond to any fundamental
extra value that the vendor itself adds to the work of our faculty who produce
this scholarship the value of scholarly journals comes
almost entirely from the labor provided by authors and researchers
themselves and then by volunteer faculty peer
reviewers and editors who offer their time
and their work to the system too and um and that's a little hard to take when
you learn about the truly intolerable profit margins that private
companies are extracting for their shareholders from our cash
strapped public institutions so these are
30 to 40 percent profit margins for top vendors and that dwarfs what investors
make from companies like apple or google and the vendors that we're
talking about today have absolute revenues in the billions
of dollars they've got profits that exceed the
annual budgets of major research funders like the howard hughes medical institute
or the welcome trust bundled big deals are um
they're they're just not good deals too so it's like with cable tv where you
might only want to watch a couple of channels but comcast makes you subscribe
to 150 of them librarians know how to how to crunch our
own data and our data shows that these big
bundles are chock full of titles that our
researchers never ever use so i'm not talking about journal
issues mind you i'm talking about whole whole titles whole journal titles that
we have to pay for and that nobody on campus
actually really wants the um the value of these bundles is also in
decline due to the growth in open access that is
the free and legal sharing of scholarly preprints and so forth
more and more of what we are paying for is available for free
outside the paywall and we've got really good systems for helping scholars to
locate those versions and for resource sharing across
institutions so you know overall elsevier and similar companies um
they do see the writing on the wall they know that this model
is coming to an end and therefore they're also putting us in a position to
have to reject some double dipping that they're doing
that is when faculty authors pay fees
to have the work that they place in subscription journals made
open access our prices for that same journal can't continue
to go up that's just simply not fair our our colleagues in the uk have
recently issued a public statement calling for a 25
price reduction on big deals explaining that this is a
long overdue recalibration and that demand
or a little better plus um an effort to make sure that we're really wanting what
we're paying for all that sounds about right to us
great thanks a lot thanks a lot bethany and so
the next thing a question that came through was about
how we decide which journals are valuable and if we have to make cuts
or make a custom bundle how will we decide what to keep and what to cut
and i wonder uh tyler walters from virginia tech if you could answer say a
little bit about that question
yeah thanks brandon i can definitely reply to that
so first i'd just like to say that the data that we're working with the data
that we have now in 2020 is just so much more rich and
informative than the data we were working with in 2016 when we signed our
current deal for the freedom collection we have data sources from products and
services like one figure unsub counter 5 reports
and green glass and other other resources as well
so when we think about what is a subscription just to ask that basic
question we know that there's really this is well
it's very familiar to us all but it's really just one way of
providing access and for low use titles to pay as much as we are to have
something ready online available to get at any time when it's
barely if never used is just an extremely expensive way to go
about doing it so how do we know a journal is worth our
while of course we look at article downloads
and the numbers or amount of downloads we all know that but what does
that really tell us it tells us somebody downloaded an
article but we don't know really what anybody's doing
with the articles with that so we do look at other factors
such as uh citation rates for articles in a given journal and we put a lot of
weight on that that's telling us that there are scholars out there that
are using those works in their own work we also look uh
quite a bit at our own researchers and where they publish where where are the
venues of the journal venues that they uh really
enjoy and see are important to their own work back on downloads for a moment you
know we do look at things in a more finely grained way now
as well we look at you know our downloads from recent issues are they
from older back file packages that might
inform how we provide access to to the current literature
another factor we work with our faculty on is is to
understand uh the preponderance of instant access
that's needed from a given journal or can people wait a day and that too might
tell us something about how we provide access to it
and another panelist is going to talk more about these modes of access so
we'll get into that a little bit a little bit later
um but i do want to reiterate what bethany said
is that you know the data is absolutely telling us 100
that we have hundreds of journals that are
not read or barely read to give you a quick data point from virginia tech
out of this freedom collection package there are about 40
percent of the journal titles get 50 downloads per year so that means on
average there's there's 40 percent of these journals get a download per week
from our entire university community that's all the students all the faculty
all the staff so that is barely being used and we just don't want to pay
this rate for it anymore i should mention too that there's
a lot of qualitative input on this of course we do talk with faculty who are
interested and willing to work with us on understanding uh journal publishing
journal the literature in their fields and uh
which which titles they really are covet and are important to them uh so
maybe let me go back to the very beginning of the question for just a
moment because the question was how are we going to
pick titles and i know people want to know
how many titles do we think we're going to end up with and and
i i just honestly can't answer that because we just don't really know how
many titles in the end we're going to have
but i would say you know the work that we've done here is
we think we can provide about three quarters of our usage online for a
a far smaller cost and we feel confident i think as a consortium as a partnership
here that that we can do that we can prove we can still provide
a good bid a majority of online access for a much smaller cost great thanks
tyler and that leads very directly to our next
question which is uh if it turns out that negotiations uh
play out uh in such a way that some titles are no
longer part of our subscription bundle for any
particular deal what are some of the ways that folks can
access content after a subscription is canceled and i
want to ask stuart fraser to say a little bit about that thanks
brandon um i think one of the really important
takeaways um i hope people uh get from the forum
today is that uh subscriptions are
now as tyler uh touched upon uh only one of several
uh lawful means to access scholarly materials
scholarly content from elsevier and from others we are committed uh
as a group and each of our individual libraries
to continuing to meet the research needs of uh faculty
uh and students at our institutions using a more flexible array
of methods and we believe strongly
through that process we will achieve more cost-effective operations
so among these methods of access for one thing
many of the contracts that we have um engaged in with uh vendors
of uh scholarly content like elsevier include perpetual
access and so what that means is that uh content uh that we purchased online
access to um is and will remain accessible to us uh even
after our existing contract expires uh so in a lot of those cases what would
be affected by a a
loss of subscription access would be access to new materials it would not
necessarily have an impact on access to um
to back file to older materials and that varies from contract to contract so in
each case there would be some variation but in many cases there would be
perpetual access to uh material that we
licensed purchased in the past the second means of access which i know
many of the faculty who may be attending and
others are well familiar with is interlibrary loan
basically interlibrary loan is a resource a long-standing resource
sharing process with very mature partnerships um
and uh and a increasingly innovative and robust backbone that
allows libraries to share material with one
another and it was created really to meet the
needs of libraries to have access
uh to um our scholarship that is published in journals that are
not widely um needed at their institution
but are occasionally needed so basically uh resource sharing through interlibrary
loan was designed as a way uh for libraries to share
uh those libraries with subscriptions to uh journals that are essential to
programs that they're offering can share with other libraries
that may not have programs that would require demand
lead to them subscribing to those journals
viva and our libraries in vrl um are implementing a variety of
expedited interlibrary loan processes rapid ill is
an example of one that viva is working on a group uh
license for and uh these have sped up the uh turnaround time on interlibrary
loan uh significantly in many cases now interla library loan
uh systems allow for a turnaround time of under 24 hours um and so
that is another important um uh lawful way to acquire content
um in the event that subscriptions uh are no longer in place and then the
final piece of this puzzle uh they're actually to jump
the head a little bit the next piece is open access
and um these are the platforms that uh many of the institutions i think all of
the vrl institutions have them and viva is also looking at some things across
the board for all the institutions uh in virginia
uh repositories are locations where uh either
uh working papers pre pre-print versions or if the publisher allows
final versions um of uh scholarly content can be hosted
and made accessible um at no charge uh to uh uh usually
without restriction so uh that is a third means and then the final
means uh is what
amounts to pay-per-view or on-demand purchasing
directly from publishers or through third-party vendors that work with
publishers and to purchase scholarship uh journal
articles for example at the article level so in the absence
of a subscription uh we still would be uh
able and committed to if needed purchasing directly at the
article level from the publisher or one of these third
parties which includes uh the most notable example reprints
desk is one and uh copyright clearance centers get
it now service is another those are platforms through which you
can purchase articles with the copyright clearances already
included in the purchase cost and then deliver
those articles directly into the hands of researchers so
in sum it's important to understand once again that
uh uh subscriptions are only one of many uh ways that we can now provide
scholarly content quickly and efficiently to researchers
um and that we're all collectively and individually committed
uh to doing that at uh the highest possible level
excellent thanks so much stuart um yeah i think this is one of the most
important points that we try to make when we talk about
these issues you know that the changes that we're looking at are
not changes that take access away they're changes that make access
available through different channels and sometimes that changes who you go to
for access or you know it adds a little bit of time
but but there's no world where things
disappear forever we're committed to making
resources available to the folks that need them so
my next question is for bethany and it is how does this effort by this group
of libraries relate to uh relate to the incentive
structures created by promotion and tenure
policies how does our effort to change the landscape
how are we impacted by those policies yeah okay well the first thing to say
here is that this is a highly complex
ecosystem in which we are all intertwingled
and the the push for change that you hear coming from your
your university libraries um is just one part
of what is needed and that's really why we're talking with you today with
with our faculty we're doing what we can along with our library colleagues around
the world and that includes uh sharing our
knowledge about why these models are unsustainable
for us all in libraries we are trying our hardest
to limit our investments in broken models and we are
investing in what we see as viable sustainable
alternatives um and those include institutional repositories they include
pre-print platforms other open infrastructures and
aligned services that are designed by scholars
for scholars so so that's important to say first
but but we need your help because that only gets us
so far so without reform to the entire system
research is going to continue to flow behind pay walls
or into oa journals that have sky-high article processing fees and that
reform that is needed really has its roots in what
you all as scholars and researchers value
in where you choose to push where you place your energies and your gifts
and where you put the products of your labor it's it's about how you shape the
future of your own disciplines and of course one tool for doing that is
addressing through your professional associations and locally at the academic
department level the expression of your discipline's values that takes
the form of promotion and tenure guidelines
that is what you're telling the next generation of scholars in your field
fundamentally matters and where you tell them that you want to see their work
appear so the most important consideration
and reform i might suggest is to look at removing journal-based metrics
from research evaluation and that's not just good for
promoting a more sustainable economy around scholarly
communication i think it's good for scholarship itself
and this really came home to me earlier in my career i was sort of
making a tour of australian universities that were
doing interesting work in the digital humanities and they were
wanting to create a new professional association and a new interdisciplinary
open access journal so that they could network and broaden
and build a really interdisciplinary field
but a kind of a research assessment exercise had just been instituted there
at the national level in which journals had assigned impact
factors to them so they had numerical scores
and everybody there in the middle of all of this
intellectual foment was also kind of fundamentally down-hearted
because how could you create a new journal how could you create a new field
when it would come into the picture with an impact factor of zero and the
feeling was that all the scholarly creativity and
interchange across the humanities and engineering and social science and
everything else was about to hit the brick wall of an
ossified set of top journals that were really not
welcoming of the new so anyway so on on reconsidering
journal-based metrics um models and principles already exist you don't have
to reinvent the wheel here so i would
suggest looking at things like the leiden manifesto
or sf dora the san francisco declaration on
research assessment but my big takeaway here
is that the the system can't change our research fields our scholarly
disciplines will be slower to evolve to advance to open themselves up to
completely new ideas and scholarly insights
as long as a few journal titles notably the titles that are least accessible to
broad publics and to less well-funded institutions
as long as those are the ones that hold the keys for faculty to
career success and all the power to address that lies in the hands
of our faculty and we want to be partnering with
and serving you and enabling you to realize um your own
power for change
thank you bethany wow a powerful story um
and so that's a great story about how you know libraries are enmeshed in a
system that that can change the way we have to
operate but of course when libraries change the
way we operate uh that'll have ripple effects
among the rest of the ecosystem and so john unsworth i wanted to ask you
you know what do we anticipate could be the
impact of our uh sort of move toward a more sustainable model
on maybe smaller publishers scholars scholarly society journals and so on
are we going to endanger those folks by rethinking our approach to big deal
bundles it's a very reasonable question we know
that some scholarly societies rely on subscription revenue from big deal
partners unfortunately we also know that in the
past big deals have forced us to cancel subscriptions to some independent
society journals ironically driving some of those
societies into the arms of big deal publishers so as libraries rethink our
commitments to big deals we can begin to reverse this process
dedicating more resources to sustaining independent publications that are
scholar-led and that support the research community
rather than supporting a commercial entity
the open scholarship community which includes libraries and research funders
is creating support systems for journal editors societies etc who
want to pivot to more sustainable models several of the libraries in this
virginia research libraries group and many others across the country
provide publishing services that can help bring journals to the public at a
fraction of the cost associated with commercial publishers and if you haven't
looked at it i recommend the library publishing
coalitions directory at librarypublishing.org
if you're a journal editor or an officer in a society talk to your library
about how you can partner to advance some important shared goals
we really do want to help you with infrastructure they can support a peer
review process and allow you to publish in multiple
formats with clear rights statements that preserve intellectual property
while promoting new research if you publish open access your work is
20 more likely to be cited of course if you
publish something stupid that will get 20
more attention as well i do want to say a word to small scholarly publishers in
particular though based on my experience with two pretty small scholarly
publishing enterprises the first is the text encoding
initiative this is a tremendously important multi-disciplinary
international and by now multi-generational effort to develop a
detailed and actionable ontology of literary
and linguistic texts its core publications is a set of
guidelines for text encoding now in xml the tei has existed since the late 1980s
and when i incorporated incorporated it as a non-profit membership organization
in 2000 it was a very important question whether
or not to charge for access to the tei guidelines
we chose to do so only for print and then at cost and in partnership with the
university of virginia press the result was a broader adoption of the
standard growth in the community of research users and contributors
greater internationalization and more multilingualism
open access peer-reviewed journals published with support from the tei
training materials just now redeveloped and re-released
in short a vibrant intellectual community that is not dependent on
journal income my second example though is a more
traditional scholarly society that was when i joined it entirely dependent on
journal income or more accurately indentured to their commercial publisher
such that we collected subscription income from members of the society and
then passed it along to them keeping about 10 percent for the
operation of the society i ditched that deal and worked with
harold short and then ray siemens to lay the foundation
of what became the alliance of digital humanities organizations
which also has a publishing deal at its heart and it's a much better deal with
an academic publisher albeit a large and commercially
successful one where they share income appropriately with the society
that creates the value for which institutions and individuals subscribe
that income has allowed at ho to support the open access digital humanities
quarterly as well as funding generous bursaries for graduate students
presenting at the annual conference and largely thanks to harold short's
brilliance at sharing we've been able to use the income to add
hoe as a platform for expanding the organization to new countries and new
research communities so what was once a bilateral u.s
organization partnered with an eu organization
has become a network of scholarly societies not only in those areas but
also in mexico taiwan japan south africa australasia
and francophone countries with more constituent organizations under
consideration for membership each year my message my message to small
publishers is this value sharing and collaboration over
outsourced services and opaque accounting own the thing you produce and
then figure out how in your particular situation you can best sustain and share
that value through some combination of things that
people or institutions pay for and things that are free don't assume
that your most valuable asset should be the one people pay for
also think about how giving away your thing of value might attract the
contribution of talent and ideas helping to create a sustainable
scholarly community thank you
thank you john again great great stories um
and really making this stuff real for folks um
so speaking of things that are real i want to get to the moment that we're
in right now we are being uh frankly forced to act
with some urgency now by the budget crisis
that's resulting from the covet 19 pandemic
and a lot of folks were wondering you know how exactly does
what we're doing now relate to the covid crisis
and what you know well is this is what we're doing now sort of a
temporary thing that's a reaction to the budget crisis
or is it going to have longer-term effects on the way we operate
and i wanted to ask john zanelis from george mason university to talk a little
bit about how covid relates to what we're doing thank you
braden good morning everyone i'd like to start
by observing that to one degree or another
at most academic institutions library budgets
have been declining or otherwise constrained
prior to the onset of the covet pandemic that was certainly the case at my
university the pandemic has brought on additional
budget pressures on our universities which has necessitated broad and deep
budget cuts which likely highly likely will continue and not
recover
well into the for foreseeable future so we have transitioned at this point in
time from a generally not so good into a
horrible severe physical environment
in such physical realities were compelled to restructure and
rebalance our budgets and that includes library budgets this is uh
what drives us at our individual institutions
and also collectively to take urgent action
simply put academic library financial models
that made good sense some time ago at least in some institutional settings
are no longer terrible nor sustainable
big deals occupy a significant footprint on
our collections budgets in george mason university's case
it is roughly one-third of our current uh library
uh research materials budget
but i think the financial uh
the the impacts of uh the pandemic uh on our finances
in in in all the effects of that uh just accelerate the inevitable
collapse of the status quo
for all the reasons talked about by my colleagues already
we need to make drastic changes to our library collection strategies
and such changes will not be temporary uh
or reversible uh given the current crisis
and in retrospect it's something we have needed to do for some time
uh so what do we do now and going forward
it is important to be strategic in our decision making
we need to do more than just meet immediate spending targets
some strategies will have commonalities across institutions
while other approaches will need to address specific and
perhaps unique institutional circumstances and needs
as we discontinue big deals we need to allocate funds to cover costs
for other forms of access for example in their library loan and
document delivery commercial article purchases
tools for discovery of open access content and so forth
based on reports by some institutions we have already
departed big deals we know the costs for alternative access are more manageable
even in some cases they can be characterized
as typically modest in in some institutional settings
we need to create capacity as well as scope
in our collections budgets to be able to better fund where we expect growth
to redirect funding to areas where we may have
unmet needs and importantly to invest in more sustainable ways of
sharing research across our institutions uh and and much
more broadly so uh in concluding uh my remarks
uh i would say that we are at a point um where
most if not all of us are faced with historic reality
of significantly diminished budgets we demand for scholarly uh scientific
resources in associated services are not
diminishing uh but they are growing in our
institutions so the game plan that worked relatively
well for many of us in the past has to be
recalibrated and changed to more effectively respond
to the current and future challenges
this is inevitable thank you thank you so much john and um so
the next question i want to ask uh relates to the way the complicated we've
been talking a little bit about how there's a kind of complex ecosystem here
and what's interesting and maybe fewer of our
folks in the audience will know is that each vendor
sort of has a complicated ecosystem of products
that it sells and i wonder teresa not from vcu if you could help us understand
a little bit better how big deals relate to other products
in the vendors portfolios and how we're thinking about the
consequences of the choices we might have to make as they could kind of
reverberate throughout that vendor ecosystem
sure thank you brandon and good morning everyone so
vendors like elsevier and wiley have been pivoting to
being a data analytics business for some time
they are striving to monetize the insights that they gain
into the research that our institutions do
by their control of the literature additionally they are building products
that plug into every step of the research flow
these products are designed to simply seamlessly integrate with each other
and thus entice customers to buy more of their products to leverage the seamless
integration there is a real danger to academic
freedom here scholarship to scholarship is shaped by
the metrics we use to evaluate scholars and by controlling
metrics vendors are given an outsize influence
on the trajectory of research itself
often these products are marked or excuse me are marketed to
different campus units such as the provost or the office of research
this can undermine our efforts to control the cost for the library
for those products that we license so it's really
important that we communicate and coordinate across the university as well
as across the commonwealth for vcu and other customers elsevier
links pricing across products and contracts so we have
to be especially careful to anticipate how changes will ripple
out in our particular case our clinical key contract
is linked to the continuation of our current science direct license agreement
over the last few years we have asked clinical key to
align the contracted dates so the clinical key contract would be
in sync with sciencedirect and they've refused to do this
from what we can glean from others this seems to be a common practice
and so i think that they use these different
termination dates to put you in this bind of
well i'm going to have to cancel this if the other
is in question so in fact we are in the process of terminating our clinical key
contract at this moment as we move into renegotiating with
elsevier and one of the most important things
about these agreements from my perspective is that they lack
transparency so our clinical key agreement is written
in such a way where there's a nebulous increase should
we walk away from our science direct contract so we don't
know what the consequences are for us to walk away
and this is representative of other things that happen with other contracts
thanks theresa so this is a this is a complex system
this is a really complex system that we're working in um
and you know that's part of why it's taken us a while to think through what
to do um but we're feeling pretty good about
where we are now and we're also starting to think about the
future and i wanted to ask carrie cooper to kind of bring us home
here and talk a little bit about what a
sustainable future might look like you know if we transition away from
something uh that we have lots of problems with um what is what
does the world look like if we uh if we find something better what's a
better model going to bring us to thank you brandon i think it's really
important to kind of imagine what that does look like it
helps us get there just by imagining it and i think we have to get back to our
values equitable access diverse collections and fair costs
for example a future with equitable access would
erase the global divide and um in access to research for both readers
and authors it would demonstrate our commitment to
solving big problems beyond the higher education community it
would let faculty authors retain their rights and share and reuse
their work it would enable text and data mining
across all published research and it would end
high author fees that create new barriers
to research publication this time for authors instead of the readers
and a future with diverse collections would better meet the unique needs of
our research communities because one size doesn't fit all
it would foster scholar-led initiatives at our institution that brings control
back to our scholarly community and most
importantly it would support independent and underrepresented voices and outlets
and approaches
a future with fair costs would end non-disclosure agreements that prevent
healthy competition and foster transparency about how prices
how the price of the product relates to the operation of
a service it would end unfair tactics like double dipping
where we charge the libraries and we charge the authors
and it would lower costs for students with open educational resources
it would help us avoid a bigger deal that would just replace
unsustainable subscriptions with unsustainable author fees
so it's really about getting back to our values equitable access
diverse collections and fair costs i hope that helps
us imagine what this looks like
thanks carrie thanks a lot and so yeah that's the future we're looking
toward and uh that that sort of concludes the the
questions that we heard from the group with
a group of registrants with one a little bonus i wanted to
to include um we had a few questions i know there's a lot of librarians in the
audience who were curious about how we're doing this and
you know how are we gonna how are we going to pull this off and
the good news is for us especially we're not the first
ones to go here and we're not the only ones to do this
right now and so we really wanted to recognize some of
the folks that are that have paved the way and who are
walking this road with us now and i wanted to um i think we've
elevated now david carlson and naraya lamas um to panelists status
and i wondered if uh maybe starting with narea
um if uh maria if you could tell us a little bit about the university of north
carolina's experience going through this process uh and
and having concluded a deal with elsevier that you all are happy
with and that now you're working forward on yes thank you brandon good morning
everyone i'd be happy to tell you a little bit
about our process and and where we are today with it
so we started our elsevier negotiation in spring of 2019
and we had a goal of not necessarily breaking the deal but we
needed to spend less and we decided a million dollars was
what we wanted to cut from our spend with elsevier and just before
we started to talk with them we decided we needed to do an
informational campaign on campus and so we launched our own
sustainable scholarship campaign and it started with our
university librarian she started doing some
presentations i did them it went all the way down to
our liaisons we spread it across campus in meetings and departmental settings
and one-on-ones in administrator meetings so
we really took it far and wide we went out with four values
we talked about affordability sustainability
transparency and open and public access and we everyone understands open access
but we needed to add in the public because carolina is a very public
institution and we believe in that public mission
and so we believe that that would resonate well with our campus
and it and it truly did um at the same time that we were talking to
campus about sustainable scholarship which was
partly around elsevier but it was a much
broader message that we were trying we were trying to contextualize
the landscape and trying to say that we could not
continue in the same way that we always had with
these big deals and in fact we had already
gone through a process of breaking big deals before we had broken the wiley
deal a couple years before i came on board and so
this was not an unfamiliar message but i think it was the first time that we
really explained what this meant and why it was not sustainable so at the same
time that we were going out there with our message
talking to elsevier we were also not knowing what the outcome would be
investigating how we would take care of scholar needs
if we did break this deal and and canceled many
uh journals and so we spent a lot of time like other institutions have
looking at options for ill including reprints desk which is a vendor who
has an automated system and and ultimately we did incorporate reprints
desk into our strategy um
i wanna i wanna acknowledge uh what teresa was talking about with
clinical key we had the exact same problem our clinical key was was
going to be up at the end of september they ignored our attempts to talk to
them and until they finally got the
cancellation message we said we are canceling we no longer need this
we we cannot go forward if we don't know what the cost will be
at the end of this negotiation and they scrambled a little bit
they came back they tried to get us back ultimately we just canceled
um and so that happened before we got to the end of our negotiation with
sciencedirect with elsevier and um so by the time we got to spring
of 2020 so it took us a year more than a year to
get to the to the final point we uh had decided we were going to break
the bundle we were going to go title by title
we decided to go out and ask the campus about their use of titles we were
concerned about clinical uh titles and clinical usage in in our med
school in our hospitals and other clinical settings and so
essentially we went out and asked them how they use
their titles so that we could focus in on on those clinical titles and those
became the core of the package or the title list that we have now i
shouldn't say package we have 395 titles down from the
maybe couple thousand that we had to begin with and our spend
uh for this for this year was at 1.6 million so we brought it down
by a million um it was i will say a tremendous amount of work
we had many many people in the library involved
again from the university librarian down to our liaisons across our tech services
this is this is an enormous effort that has to go
in but it was well worth it um we have uh we talked to so many people
on campus that messaged us afterwards and said thank you for
breaking that deal with elsevier we are so happy can we do that with other
publishers we have real champions now on campus
that's not to say that it's all rosy there are problems
um with access at at times for people that's never gonna go away but by
and large um we i think were successful in doing
this and i just looked at a couple numbers
before i came on to the webinar this morning
uh just our reprints desk numbers we were didn't know what to expect because
we offered it out there for people who needed
their articles urgently out between may and august
out of the 276 articles we have purchased from reprints desks
only 123 are from elsevier titles so by and large the needs are being met
through regular interlibrary loan through our historic access so as
mentioned earlier we have permanent access to back files
so most most people's uh needs are being taken care of through regular means
and uh having the reprints desk is just a
piece of mind for everyone i'll stop there
thank you so much norea that's um it's just so heartening to know
uh how well your experience turned out um but also it's to take to take
note of how hard this can be and how much work it is
but knowing it pays off i think especially for those of us
on uh in the panelists side of things uh you know
it gives us great comfort to know that there's life on the other side and
things turn out pretty well so next i wanted to ask david carlson
the dean of libraries at the texas a m university to say a little bit about
where the texas libraries are and i know you're in the midst of
negotiations and so you'll have to be uh cagey
but um but maybe you could also just say how you got here
and um what the values were that brought you
to negotiating in a new way this time around than you have in the past
sure i i don't i don't want to think of myself as being cagey brandon i think
circumspect would be maybe uh a better word but you're right and that was going
to be the first thing i was going to say uh is that i do need to be circumcised
and what i say for a couple reasons uh number one strategically of course we we
don't want to in any negotiations process you don't
want to say everything about how you're how you're thinking what
you're doing but also i want to respect the negotiations process itself with
without severe so and let me just also say that i i'm just so impressed with
uh all the comments by all the speakers you have no idea
i mean i've been jotting things down and my head's been shaking up and down and
affirmation um all of the values and statements and
perspective you've been saying are just uh really have aligned with uh what
we've been doing um i mean there's so much to say about
this uh and i certainly agree with a lot of
the perspectives that have already been said in terms of how we got
here i think whenever anybody asks me about
this i always have to give a shout out to the university of california
um i think the university of california um
position and statement on this and their decisive nature
on our decision on this stand on this i should say
about a year and a half ago now getting up to two years was really in my opinion
the game changer um all of a sudden i practically the
week that happened um all of a sudden i was getting emails
uh and queries from people i'd never heard from before
about this issue who would say well what are we doing in this space
and they just gave all of us i think a kind of a backbone
um to this issue that said exactly what you were saying brandon this this can be
done uh it's not jumping off a cliff uh there
is survival uh for a number of different reasons many of which you've touched
upon and the discussion has also reminded me
that when when we put out the press release about
the texas coalition i got a wonderful unsolicited email from
stanley wander walder at lsu who has also done a lot of
the same unbundling significant unbundling that unc
described and uh he just as i say and an
unsolicited email and he wanted us to take comfort and he
told us that the uh the decision at unc was at lsu excuse
me as and i quote a perfect unmitigated
success they have absolutely no regrets and
they're moving forward and uh everything i won't say everything is
well but perfect but it but it's pretty good
um not only is there survival uh it's much better than that life is good
so um our approach to the business has been
in a number of ways first of all our coalition is quite different
i'm really very very proud of it but it's also very diverse
it includes both public institutions and private institutions so we have
all the university of texas libraries texas a m et cetera
but we also have really some premier and leading
private libraries such as rice university
baylor university etc we have some very strong
research intensive institutions and we have some very
teaching intensive institutions so it's a very diverse group
one of the things that has really brought us together
is that we have all agreed and signed on to a memorandum of understanding about
our organization a little bit of explicit analysis of
what our views and values are and a little
briefly about how we are organized and it was required that that be signed
by an upper-level administrative person at the university and that has done
i mean i thought it was a good idea to do this from the beginning for a number
of reasons but it's turned out to be an even better idea
than i anticipated because it really got the institution
to talk about this commitment formally and seriously
and then to actually put a put a name and a statement in a signature document
that said yes we're in on this so lastly i'll just i'll just conclude
by saying a few things about very broadly about what our approach to
negotiations is which i think will harmonize with a lot of what you said
um we are not set on de-bundling unbundling excuse me we are not set on
withdrawal or walking away from negotiations we are
not set on a transformative agreement but
what we are set on is change we think it's high time for
change substantive change i remember in one of
our early meetings with our elsevier representatives they referred to their
contract one of the representatives referred to their contract as byzantine
i think this was a frank moment and i agree with them a hundred percent
we have contracts that are based on decades old commitments of print
subscriptions it's it's absurd uh and so that needs to
change and then secondly the other commitment
we have is to price reduction um an additive approach is no longer
appropriate and we need to get to price reductions for many of the reasons
you've talked about so i'll wrap up there but thank you for for
all of this and thank you for the time to speak briefly about the texas after
efforts
thank you so much david um circumspect as always
uh and and lovely and lovely to see you as always
thanks so much for sort of being our guest today um
and you know i think we probably uh we we are very much aligned with the texas
libraries uh about what the priorities are and what we're looking for
um so that thus ends the uh planned portion the scripted
portion if you will of the program and now we've got
actually a substantial amount of time which is lovely uh to hear from your
kind of live questions during the forum and so um
i've got in front of me here a list of some of those questions
and i wonder if we could start with a question for actually we'll bring in
one perhaps let's see let me we're testing the tech
here but we've got a little time um i'm going to ask if jordan our tech
guru could bring in ann osterman who is the
executive director of viva and see if she wants to answer this
question about how viva and the virtual library of virginia
represent figures into all of this stuff
i don't see and we're putting you on the spot if that's okay
and we see you or we we here heard you
momentarily
hmm all right well the joys of live television here
um we might then yes john yeah i think i think i could
take this as the chair of the steering committee for
for um there are a number of uh
subscriptions that viva pays for uh or contributes to
that are extremely important to member libraries the elsevier contract's not
one of those um and i guess in this context that's
the most important point and i i think one reason that it's not
a viva collection is that it's so expensive
and that spreading that cost to say community colleges
uh in the viva system wouldn't really make sense and that's why the virginia
research libraries a subset of viva uh have negotiated together in the past
for the elsevier contract and are are planning to do so
again we would love to see broader access
to some of that content that will depend on on price more than anything
else
brandon could i jump in and add just one more thing here
unless we've got an audio all right seems like maybe not the other thing i'd
like to add is that we are all part of this rich and vibrant
viva network and through the resource-sharing
partnerships that stretch all over the commonwealth of virginia
we know that what we do as research institutions impact
others and and you know i'm still relatively new to my role but i have
found the intersection between the vrl
partners and viva to be thoughtful rich vibrant and we
we know that um that we're all connected and all in this together
excellent thanks bethany um so uh the next question i wanna i wanna go to
is actually um very well put and i wanna thank jay
albanese for asking the question and i'm going to maybe read a little bit of it
at length and then i'll ask tyler walters if he wants to respond
jay says it seems to me that most academics
or at least many academics are not as well informed about the access crisis
as they could be and i've read where 70 plus of social science journals are
owned by just five corporations and hidden behind a paywall that's true
uh consolidation is a big problem in this market
um so this works directly against the goal of global access
and uh in social science the relevance of social science to
applied fields and access to that for practitioners so
to keep one's research open and access in these journals requires exorbitant
publication fees my question what do you think of
so-called diamond journals which require no fees for authors and are open access
to readers i have published in a couple of them in
recent years and found the quality of reviews is the same
as other journals and the timeliness in review to publication is much shorter
but of course they're new and they're not yet considered leading journals
because academics appear to be led by prestige i.e the age of the journal
rather than prioritizing access and dissemination to their work so
these diamond journals the diamond model is really attractive because it's free
to authors and free to readers tyler i wonder if you could talk a
little bit about that free to authors free to readers model
yeah thanks brandon i can so yeah there's a lot that's excellent question
and a lot to unpack there um i guess i would start by saying you know
open access in its most simplest form is about the scholarship
being freely available for readers so i i'm the way i think about this is i
kind of decouple that from the business model
of how a journal derives revenue to pay for its expenses and we've seen a
very popular model for especially around stem
journals is the apc author page charges the diamond or
platinum it's also called open access it doesn't involve that it's more about
sponsorship that's taking care of of the cost
so i can give you an example i was involved in a journal
uh that is a platinum journal that's about 16 years old now it's called
information technology and international development
that's going great guns and it's uh now sponsored by the annenberg school
out of the university of southern california
but it's scholar-led it's independent he said hanneberg sponsors it now
and it's it has just been it's been excellent it's been online for
i think all but the first two years of its experience
so i think it's an example of a scholar-led
independent journal and it's high quality so
the other part of all of this is the peer review system as
jay as you said the uh the reviews seem to be very good if
anything shorter in time and the the business model should be
completely separated from the peer review model peer review
in these kind of journals can be just as robust as
any any journal out there any uh commercially sponsored uh
scholarly journal so there's you know there's a lot to be said for that i
think people shouldn't shy away from those the
other problem that you're pointing to is kind of this prestige culture that we
have as faculty around our scholarly journals
and how do we find which ones seem to be most valuable
well many times it's the list of names and
their reputations who are on the editorial boards uh the length of
time something's been out but i think we need to be putting
increasing value on journals that help us help us meaning
universities and our faculty to get new scholarship
out there in a broad and fast way and that's where
we have the most impact of society especially as a as a
public university here at virginia tech we serve the state
we serve the world and it's about getting new research out
there so it has that positive impact it helps the people who
need it that's you know that's actually the old cooperative extension service
model from that's still going on today from from years ago
so we need to question that that prestige aspect of it
and can we not see that perhaps more valuable
or at least as valuable is this broad and fast access
excellent thanks tyler and so our next question
uh comes from david burdige and actually before i get to that question we had a
we had someone ask about uh if there are tweeting rules and uh
lisa i i follow your tweets of things all the
time and uh the rule is please tweet uh this is a live event open you know
we're going to make it all publicly available
so tweet at your tweet a tweet it will um so the next question uh from david
burdidge and apologies if i got your name wrong
um david asks part of the problem as i see
it is that with the rise of the internet we've gotten used to
and now expect immediate access to anything we want you know at no cost
is it not unreasonable to think that if we adjust our expectations
so that we get what we want or need uh with perhaps a little delay a day or so
we can cut costs dramatically with very little real impact
on scholarly activity and productivity and that really goes to
uh something we were talking about earlier in terms of alternative access
and and you know timing being in in fact one of the main things that will change
or the only thing that may change um so i wonder if any of our panelists
would want to comment a little bit more and expand on those ideas
sure i'll jump in i just want to say thanks jay
that's great it's really nice to know that um faculty um you know i i do think
that faculty um understand um the
situation that higher education is in and i would like to see that faculty
would be willing to wait a day um or a reasonable amount of time
um i you know i believe in the structures and the systems that we
already have in place i think we're gonna i think we're gonna
do great i think we're gonna meet your expectations or exceed your expectations
if the big deal goes away so i just want to thank you for asking
that question i do think that um lowering expectations
just a little bit um might really help us um but um
i think we're gonna we're gonna surprise you
absolutely would anybody else like to comment on that
the part of the question about getting access to anything we want at no
cost um there have been great costs and we have obscured that from our
faculty colleagues in trying to make access easy for all of
you which is still our goal but but part of what we're doing here
today is sharing with you you know the unsustainable burden that
those costs have placed and the impact on other parts of the
scholarly communication ecosystem by putting too much of our
money in one space
hugely important point yeah what we're doing now is
is closing a communication loop that has not been closed for a long time and it's
so important you know when the primary user
doesn't know what something costs it's very hard for them to understand
the trade-offs involved and you know and how the whole system works so
i have another good another great question this one from richard poinder
richard asks i am wondering what the implications
might be for the ill system if universities rely on it increasingly
if they unbundle and switch to using things like interlibrary loan
as a mode of access and here any of our deans could answer
and i also narea i wonder if you could you could expand a little bit on
what you've seen in terms of interlibrary loan
use since unc made the changes in its bundle that might be a place to start
sure so we uh our deal with elsevier
ended at the end of may um so that's it's a really short period of
time that we have to measure the impact of the unbundling
especially with the pandemic sort of on top of that
and the change in research and teaching so
all of those caveats to say that we haven't seen very much
at all of an increase in interlibrary loan
interlibrary loan has been as steady as it can be we
were closed for a number of months and so the only interlibrary loan we did was
for electronic resources which would include the
articles and we saw that a pretty stay pretty
steady and as i indicated before we did give
people options for uh requesting expedited articles
through reprint's desk and those have been very minimal so i i
think i think there are a couple of things
happening one is that the expectation perhaps is right people are waiting
and don't need things immediately and regular interlibrary loan
works for them quite well um i i think the
other piece of it is that um we did a very good job
in selecting the articles that were needed in the journal titles that were
needed immediately and i say that because we focused in on
the clinical titles which everyone told us they needed to have at hand
and because we did that i think we took care of a large part of that urgent need
so from our perspective interlibrary loan
works well i do have questions around long term how well will we do
as we all start to unbundle and cancel how much access will we have but i think
we it's hard to tell at this point in time
thanks so much norea yeah that that that experience
is consistent with what's been published you know lots of libraries have been
down this road and there's pretty deep research from
folks that have been uh down this road for a few years and
they look back and they still see that you know if you as you say if you choose
wisely in the things that you keep the interlibrary loan volume is actually
quite modest um and that's just another kind of proof
of something that we said earlier in the presentation which is
a lot of the stuff that we're paying for right now people really don't
read that often at all or ever so when we cut those things uh they it
turns out nobody comes looking for them because they were never reading them in
the first place um so i want to go down to
another question um let's see we have quite a few good ones
um i have another one from
lisa henschleff about viva and wiley so lisa says viva had a wily
agreement that funded open access publishing
and is there a goal to support open access
publishing in uh in elsevier journals or other
uh journals or are we focused on cutting the cost of access
uh and and saving saving money so i wonder if any of the this is a
tricky this is a tricky question but i wonder if anyone in our group
wants to take a take a shot at this question of
you know open access big deals and costs how are we thinking about that
in this course brandon uh yeah it looks like anne's
successfully reconnected uh if she's able to this would be a good
question for her to begin i hope you can hear me so
victory um well yeah i think in so many ways open access is a critic
moving that forward is critical to our member libraries to the consortium
i think finding the right fit for that can be very challenging
we've talked about a variety of ways of doing that in terms of
the large publishers getting a a really good take on the holistic spend
is critical in the read and publish i like i'll let these folks speak to
the elsevier specifically because that's not a big deal but we also talk a lot
about controlling apc costs and and really
containing those they're they kind of run rampant at times and
there's not a whole lot of transparency we also want to have an eye
on new models for smaller publishers as well as possible infrastructure
so i think i just want to emphasize there's there's no doubt that open
access is key to all of us in moving these things forward
but it's not always with the big publishers that we see it
in the same way and i'd love to have someone here talk about the
elsevier aspect of that thanks tan um so would any of the
deans in the group want to say something about elsevier in particular
and keeping in mind uh circle inspection at this stage
right um but what what what can we say about open access
in connection with elsevier in particular
well uh brandon i think we can say uh essentially what
has been said already which is
we're not in pursuit of a transformative agreement
here we are interested as are the other libraries
that have spoken about this process we're interested in reducing
our spend
thanks john yeah i think that's that's a nice clear way to put it
um and so we've got just a few minutes left but there's a great question that
just came in uh from anita waltz at virginia tech
about you know we could now this is a you know we're in a budget crisis and we
have to just basically balance our budgets and
you know make our way through but if we have savings
um i wonder if we can say a little bit about
what we would do i mean part of our opening argument was things are out of
balance in our collection or they will be soon
if we don't if we don't put the brakes on some of
these deals so what will we do if we're able to change
the paradigm and we experience some of the savings that we've seen at
places like unc who wants to take that one on tyler i
see your hand raised sure i can take a stab and
hi anita thanks for being here um you know what's going to happen with the
funds saved well you know we had some thoughts
and ideas and of course the the economic situation we're in now
that's pandemic related the quick answer is going to be whatever
savings we get first it's going to be put toward all of our
own budget cuts i i think i can speak for the group that you know we're all
facing some budget cuts and some of the savings
want to be used towards that the other thing i'd say keep in mind that you know
one mode of access we probably will will use quite regularly
is going to be some form of commercial document delivery service and that does
cost so some money needs to be set aside for that as well uh we could have
increased inter-library loan costs perhaps outside of virginia within
virginia we don't charge one another as you know um but there could be
increased costs so i think those are the some quick
things that we would do we gotta we gotta
protect our budgets we've gotta think about how we fund
alternate modes of access with that money as well
excellent thanks a lot tyler so we're coming to the last couple of minutes
um and i think maybe uh this would be a good time just to sort of
just to sort of summarize where we've been right
so these seven libraries have been working together
uh now uh for years and years uh to strategize
uh to ensure that we're developing we're delivering the resources that our
scholars need uh in the best way that we can to serve
the full diverse range of interests research interests on our campuses and
we are now i think embarking on a little bit of a paradigm shift
and we are not doing it alone we're part of a global movement
and we're not the first ones to do it we really appreciate the folks that have
walked this path ahead of us and we also will need your
support and so for all the folks from our
campuses who joined us who joined this event today we just
really want to ask you to think about what you've heard
today talk to your colleagues about it come
back and talk to us about any questions you have
help us understand the things that you need
and um and and just the concerns that you have
and uh i think all of us are really um actually excited to have these
conversations now about the work that we're doing together
and the ways that the world is changing and that we're
trying to help change it for the better so
i i think i will be presumptuous enough to say on behalf of the group
as we come to 11 a.m thank you so much for joining us this morning and
uh and for going with us on this kind of journey
and we look forward to working with you as we make these changes together and to
continuing to support research on our campuses
and thank you to the beans this was a fun conversation
thanks everybody for for taking part
and everyone have a lovely friday
you