[Rachel Miles] Welcome and thank you for coming on a late Wednesday afternoon.
It is really nice out and so that's great that you're coming inside for this.
I want to give a quick little update that if you are here in person or if
you're online you can provide your name and email we have a nice brochure and we
don't have them in print currently but we can send them out electronically.
It's all about open access and the types of things you can do- open knowledge, open
education, anything open. We have a lot of information about it in the brochure and
we would be happy to send you out a link and if you have any questions you can
also email us. I'm going to go ahead and turn it over to the Dean of the
Libraries, Tyler Walters, who is going to introduce our speaker, so
thank you again for coming.
[Tyler Walters] Thank you all for coming. So I will make this brief
because I know Brandon's talk is going to be very, very interesting.
Welcome again to our keynote speaker and session for our OA Week events here at Virginia Tech so thank you again.
Our keynote speaker is Brandon Butler and Brandon serves as the
first director of information policy at the UVA library, a rather unique position.
He provides guidance and education to the UVA library and their community
on intellectual property and related matters and advocates on campus,
nationally, regionally, and in the state around open and copyright issues.
He's co-author of many book chapters,
articles, guides, and many presentations he's given
so they are all out there, you can find them.
Before coming to UVA, Brandon taught copyright and
supervised student attorneys at the IP law clinic at American University.
He also worked for the Association of Research Libraries
where he advocated for research libraries around the country.
Brandon holds his JD degree from UVA in 2008.
So with that I'm going to turn it over to Brandon.
[Brandon Butler] I apologize in advance for my froggy voice, I was up a little bit late
last night watching baseball - I'm not usually a sports guy but the Nationals are
really amazing, tune in if you haven't yet, it's really fun to watch.
So it's my pleasure to be here in Blacksburg.
I drove over this morning from Charlottesville and it's really a
pleasure to speak with you all this morning about big deals, they're sort of
my obsession lately, I every time I talk about anything else it always comes back
to big deals, I think my kids are probably aware of Elsevier and the
problems that libraries face.
So this is kind of a magnum opus presentation- it combines a lot of
thoughts I've been having over the last couple of years
a few different talks I've given I've mashed them all into kind of a master
talk so I'm hoping this will be a good overview of everything I'm trying to get
everything out there that I think I know about this topic so it'll be useful for you.
So who am I? As you heard I'm a copyright lawyer, I'm not *your*
copyright lawyer- I have to say that, right, everywhere I go at any time I talk
about legal stuff, but I am a copyright lawyer, I see all this stuff through the
lens of the copyright law and the policies that copyright law imagines
itself to be about. I'm a policy guy not a litigator. My history is to be in
Washington DC until most recently moving to Charlottesville and to think about
these issues at a systems level so I've actually only been embedded in a library
for the last two or three years at UVA. Before that, as I said, I was in DC
working on open access and copyright issues, thinking about kind of the
biggest, biggest picture, so that's kind of a way I think, that's where my
orientation is. I'm also I'm a big fan of open access - that's not a
coincidence, being a copyright lawyer who encounters scholarly publishing.
Everyone, even the most conservative
copyright lawyers I know think that there is no good reason for the way
that the scholarly publishing market works and so we have a kind of
knee-jerk response of recoiling from this whole market and the whole
structure of it so I'm deeply sympathetic to open access as an approach.
And finally I'm kind of a primarily a legal academic, you know,
I think about these things through the lens of the law and how the law
works, so that comes into play sometimes too, and a clinician, so I'm used to
working in the past for several years I worked with law students to try to solve
these kinds of problems on the on the author side, so I worked with journals to
develop access friendly authors agreements. I worked with academic
authors trying to publish in more open ways, so that's also a part of my background.
So what am I going to talk to you all about today? Well, I'll give you
the barest introduction to what big deals are because probably most of you
know, but then I'm going to talk about the global consensus that's forming in
favor of change, what's going on out there in the world, because there's a lot
going on out there in the world, what are the pressures fueling that global
consensus, why are more and more libraries demanding a different approach.
And I'll walk through those pressures one by one: rising price of journal
literature and knowledge; declining value- that's
something that we don't always talk about but I think the value that's being
offered for that price is going steadily down; and I think our values have
diverged between the Academy and some of the commercial outfits that we try to
cooperate, and something's got to happen to either bring those values into
alignment or else change the way we work. Finally, if all of this you know Sturm
and Drang means that something's gonna change, what does that change look like?
If big deals as we know them need to end, what does it look like after
they go away? so yes closer to this mic is that no
this is the one that I'm sorry stay right here
okay sorry I can hold it that's true
I'm sorry I'm not it's fine gives me something to do. If you watch me give
talks I usually have a drink in my hand and that's very obnoxious so big deals
I've put my drink down my wife was like put your drink down.
So in the late 1990s as journals were finally really
fully transitioning into electronic from
print, the big deal is the model that became the default way of making that
big transition. How do we figure out what is the right price for electronic access
to content, right, and it created this really attractive value proposition, right?
We don't know what the right price is but we know what you currently pay,
so keep paying that. If you just keep paying that and what we'll do because now we
don't need trucks or paper, we can give you everything in the electronic format
for the price that you used to pay for a portion right so you'd have a you've got
some of the books now you have everything in the cloud and it's for a
fee that is the same as it was before and it goes up at a predictable rate
right well we'll walk in like a two three four five six percent inflation
rate every year right that was the deal it sounded pretty good we can even stop
we can stop worrying about which things we bought right we could repurpose staff
retrain people focus on other things so it was a paradigm shift that was kind of
an attractive paradigm shift right so lots of people bought in. It became kind
of a default way of acquiring content but now something is changing.
Something's going on around big deals, people are freaking out over big deals.
There is a global consensus, I think, emerging that something's got to
change about these deals. What am I talking about? Well, just read
the Inside Higher Ed, read the Chronicle of Higher Education, read The Times
Higher Ed supplement. You will see there, over and over again, that libraries and
library consortia and entire European countries are leaving their deals with
Elsevier, with Springer, with different journal publishers and vendors.
They're leaving en masse and they are canceling a lot of it, they're walking
away entirely. They're not just sort of saying oh we'd like a slightly different
deal or we'd like to make me modify and tweak this so it works a little better
they're just leaning and that's even started to come ashore right now we have
the University of California has pulled the same kind of a move move they've
left entirely a boycott and in fact the faculty at the University of California
has started to take its own initiative the library will tell you all of the
libraries is the whole California system right and they will tell you this is not
us this is the library this is the faculty on their own initiative saying
we're all going to like boycott our editorial roles and our other
associations with Elsevier until they come up
better deal so what's going on right again you see all these everybody people
are leaving people are boycotting why are they why are they so mad what's
really what's at issue here I see two big trends and they break up in some
ways largely along Geographic lines other than California which California
is kind of a euro style breakup but most of the u.s. breakups are different so
the most of the u.s. breakups over the last several years have been focused on
price and these breakups have actually been happening off and on for for many
many years you can go back and read actually it's a little bit discouraging
for people like me I and I'm continued to argue for the rest of this
presentation that this time is different but there's a little bit of an eternal
recurrence vibe when you go back and look because Harvard said in 2005 this
is unsustainable we're leaving and then they come back but anyway it's a
long-running it's a long-running trend global phenomenon where cereals prices
have been plated so quickly that people just literally can't afford it and so
those folks are walking away not even necessarily on principle except for the
principle that the prices are too dang high but it happens a lot and the
institutions who do this don't typically boycott right they don't typically walk
away entirely they typically have cut back right and so if you poke around
you'll find the University of Montreal is a great example because they have
done a great job publishing a lot about what they did and why so you can find
really good studies that they've done you can see their internal methodology
they did a study on what are people using in our campus turns out a lot of
things and they're big deals people weren't using we'll talk more about that
later they cut those titles off and they're able to have a sustainable pack
by not doing big deals anymore so that's one trend Harvard has done this Florida
State Caltech West Virginia LSU Iowa state
Kansas this is a pretty widespread phenomenon the the group spark has a
cancellation tracker a big deal cancellation tracker and you can go
there and see all the different schools that have that have walked away from big
deals in this way the second trend is a little more complicated and this is
really the kind of trend that we're seeing in Europe it's a kind of price
and open access mix walk away right and this trend is really much more of a
recent phenomenon and I think it's spurred on by a policy aspiration
particularly in Europe to achieve open access now and it is in fact there was
for a while 2020 was the target year I don't know if we're gonna get there it's
probably not looking too bright for them right now on that goal but there was a
sense of urgency that the entire scholarly system needs to flip into an
open access mode where people don't have to have to pay to read all journals will
be free to read and I think also going into this trend is the perception that
the APC model is unsustainable and I'll say more about this in a little while
the APC model as we know it where otters pay a charge rather than having readers
pay that's something that actually the European countries have been pushing for
for actually a long time more aggressively than we have in England and
Germany and France they've been trying harder to use ap C's as the way to get
the literature open but what they've seen and the England didn't they study
on this a couple years ago is that they can't control the prices of the
and so the exact same problem that had occurred with subscriptions is occurring
with a PCS so they're they're frustrated they tried one way and so now they're
walking away entirely Elsevier is not accepting the kinds of
terms that these European countries are offering and so they're they're leaving
and so we've got Germany Sweden Norway all walking away France walked away came
back but only for a deal whose prices go steadily down year after year which is
defining the laws of gravity of subscriptions nobody gets that deal but
France came back for that deal and most recently again University of California
walked away using that rationale what's going on what are the pressures leading
to these walkaways and I apologize for my handwriting but not really I thought
this is kind of fun so there are three big deal pressures at play here I think
right one is the prices are increasing at an unsustainable rate we just you can
see the writing on the wall and within some years the sacrifices that will be
necessary to feed Elsevier's profit margins cannot be justified anymore we
are hitting a point we cut all the fat and we're about to start having to cut
muscle will not do it so the price increases are unsustainable period the
other thing that is not talked about as often that I think is very important is
that the value of these deals is in decline more of the literature is
available openly or more cheaply through alternative means and so we should not
be paying more and more and more when we're getting less and less and less and
then finally I think the values again of the academic community and vendors that
service record so first I'll talk about the price
inflation I'll talk about the cereals crisis you all probably know about that
if you're in library world and all I'll talk about the profits of the big
vendors I'll talk about how that affects the rest of our budgets and I'll use UVA
as an example but I can promise you we're pretty normal in this respect we
like to think we're extraordinary but in fact we're just like everyone else I
will talk a little bit about the concentration of power in the biggest
vendors and how they've accreted to themselves all of the journal literature
over time an extraordinary amount so they have now an oligopoly over the
journal literature I'll talk about their sharp bargaining practices and then
finally I'll talk about the fact that this has no relationship whatsoever to
what it actually cost them to do their jobs
so first sprite cereals crisis I love this graph so much that I wanted to draw
it myself this is the ARL the infamous ARL cereals crisis graph and it shows a
startling mind-boggling unjustifiable inexplicable level of inflation for the
prices of cereals that we've had to pay in libraries it's gone up 400 percent as
of 2011 and my belief is we've accreted another hundred odd percent in the last
decade we're near 500 percent inflation from 1986 to now in journal costs it is
an explosion in costs it blows the inflation out of the water right this
has got nothing to do with the growing cost of doing business or the growing
cost of living this is pure you know sweet sweet profit taking right and you
can see our spending on other categories of material like monographs has just
kind of amble along probably a lot closer to inflation right and probably
been cannibal if you look you can see the number of
monographs we've actually bought dipped below you know it went into the
negatives we were buying less and less and less for a long time as we were
buying more and more and more journals which you know I know
you guys like the journals in here but books are good too and it's all the more
frustrating when we compare that to the profit margins and total profits from
operating profits from the stem publishing division of Reed Elsevier
relics that's their stock ticker symbol I have it on my watch i watch them all
time when it turns red I get very happy so as you can see right there profit
margin has not dipped below 30% period that's an extraordinary profit margin
that is you've got some kind of unfair advantage to be living at steadily above
30% profit margins but even more so look at they're out there operating profits
right it's not a it's not I don't think it's a coincidence but that line is
almost as steep as the overall expenditures line that we saw a few
slides back right its profit taking it's pure profit taking and they had more
than 1.2 billion in profits in 2015 and it's only going up and up ever since it
never goes down somehow it defies all gravity let's compare that to the rest
of the economy right so the most profitable banks drug companies car
companies and tech companies they're all barely scraping that you know only the
farm up folks consistently do better than Elsevier right only only Pfizer has
more profits than Elsevier 39% profit margins for Elsevier our 37 for Apple
right 36 for Taylor & Francis 35 for Springer and then the most profitable
blank is the industrial commercial Bank of China 29 of that exclusives they
should have tried together they made they need to get into general business
widely hot on their heels and then finally sad sad Hyundai the most
profitable car company they really should trade over and get into scholarly
publishing these profit margins are extraordinary their giant red blinking
light telling us we are paying too much money so what does that do to our
collections right well at UVA the big deals with the top four vendors account
for half of all of our journal and database spending for vendors eat half
of all of our journal and database money of that half Elsevier needs half right
also he was eating about a quarter of all of our journal and database money
and that's grown hugely just in the last few years so in 2009 that was like 20%
and by 2016 it was 40% because of all the mergers and acquisitions they've
been able to do right and so this this is not a sustainable pattern it's bad
for a word that I really love Biblio diversity right how many different kinds
of entities are offering us information if we're buying all of our information
from three or four brokers using the same business model are we sure we're
getting the truth right are we sure we're getting something reliable are
we're sure are we sure we're building something sustainable that can that can
that can grow and change and evolve along with us or are we need to stuck
sustaining a business model that's rather than too profitable to change
right compared to everything compared to
monographs and other kinds of things by the overall journals and databases
account for 83% of our collections budget I think that's probably bigger
here maybe not as concerning for y'all but fur you know the people of the book
are concerned at UVA I can tell you about the fact that you know they get
them easily 17% of our budget and and for UVA that works out actually that
maps one to one from state state funding and endowments all of our state funding
everything we get from the state goes to journals and databases we can only buy
monographs because we have something down there funding what it took to build
up the slack and the endowment funding is not going to grow fast enough to keep
covering that so we're gonna have to
find another way and then this graph shows the trend in
consolidation all the red the red bar represents small
publishers being bought by big publishers in the natural medical
sciences that's the consolidation trend the blue bars are small publishers being
bought by big publishers in the social sciences so the red and blue together
represent consolidation and only the little training a little to the tiny
orange tips at the top the last several years represent going back to smaller
things right again bad for Biblio diversity lots of
consolidation lots of buying up merging and acquiring
when we get into the room with these folks it is hard they use sharp
bargaining practices - they use that they use really sharp bargaining
practices to try to make it difficult for us to strike a good deal to them so
if you look at if you compare the big deal to the ala carte price list the ala
carte price list is a kind of fiction right it is created intentionally to
shove you into the big deal the prices for leaving are punitive it
is it's a fantasy price list that doesn't have a lot to do with an actual
market and has a whole lot to do with manipulating you into buying the thing
they want you to buy it feels like you're at Disney World right you'd
nobody wants to buy tickets you got to buy the little bracelet right it's the
same kind of thing it's arranged so that you don't you don't buy one by one by
one they won't give you discounts on smaller packages right they will only
give you a discount on the full enchilada if you go smaller and that's
been the tradition now I actually think this practice is changing again because
of the pressures I've described I've heard that more vendors are open to kind
of skinny bundles but in the past part of the Shak practice has been no skinny
bundles you take it all or you leave it there are punitive fees for exiting
these deals right so when you exit a deal suddenly it's it's kind of like it
starts to look like your cell phone bill right
oh there's an equipment fee and a service fee and uh you know but the
Chihuahua fee you know and these fees just pile up all of a sudden because
you've left a big deal if you stay with the big deal oh my gosh all the fees go
away it's really obnoxious they've also beer in particular so the
biggest some of the biggest baddest vendors will resist the ways that
libraries have used with other folks to get good deals right so when we
typically would we'd like to work together and come to deals that work for
multiple institutions Elsevier has resisted that they've not
wanted to strike deals with big consortium so we have to bargain in
groups of three five seven libraries at a time they resist and also they push
negotiations to the last minute this is really fascinating you know what we're
doing right now this conversation that we're having this doesn't ever happen
you don't usually think about big deals until the year it's going to be renewed
about a month before that deadline runs out that's when Elsevier will start
asking or taking your phone calls and start having a negotiation with you
about whether you're gonna renew your big deal or not up until then they would
like for you to not think about it they don't want you to talk about it with
people on your campus they don't want you to try to educate them or to learn
from them about what they do with these materials because the less you know
walking into that room the less power you have in terms of making a demand for
a package that's going to work for you might be less than the big deal so all
of these practices work to ensure that we walked into that room without a lot
of power so and this is maybe the thing that I get more excited about because
everything I think I've just told you is kind of like conventional wisdom I think
everybody knows the big deal of kind of stinks
it's it's too expensive it's getting it's growing too fast but I feel like
this is something that I personally have learned over the last couple of years of
wrestling with a big deal that I don't think is as well known which is the big
deals are less valuable now than they used to be and I'm going to talk about
why that is so first I'm gonna talk about how we can adjust this notion of
cost per use because we're often told the reason a big deal is attractiveness
that you know you only pay a little bit for each use and that's better right
it's sort of it's the Sam's Club of journals then I'll talk about some other
problems with the cost per you symmetric besides the big ones that I'll describe
and then I'll talk about what alternative access is and why it's on
the rise so cost per use this is the metric that we're all told to use to
figure out what you know whether this is a good deal right here's what it's very
intuitive it's the very model of intuitiveness you pay X dollars you get
Y uses X divided by Y tells you what you pay for use and if that number is lower
than what you would pay if you had to buy each journal you know that you
should take the big deal and what do you know every time we come to the table the
number is lower on the big it's shocking and so we always buy the
big deal is this number trustworthy or are there problems with it well one way
I think about that number is to think about all these uses right so we have a
big old chunk of uses in a year right that's the chunk that we're gonna cut up
and say each one of these costs three dollars or 250 or whatever but half of
those uses are actually think they've been to different compelling research
articles using two different methodologies that have determined that
for some of the biggest journal vendors including Elsevier there is a 2 X factor
in cost in in uses that encounter data that we just they can't be explained any
other way then something Elsevier is doing that we can't explain that is if
you line up Elsevier journals next to anybody else's Journal of comparable
quality comparable Citation frequency comparable field etc the Elsevier
general will just have two X uses than the other one and we can't there's no
explanation for that so one study did that kind of comparability and the other
study looked at the actual like browser logs usage logs so Caltech actually had
like the granular you know this person on this IP address downloaded this
journal article at this time sort of through a freak accident of IT
weirdness they came into this data and used it from good and hopefully destroy
it but they have the same result they said look if we compare those logs to
our counter data that we get from Elsevier this says here's how many times
we use it it's about 2x they're doubling their
number is about double our number I don't know what's happening but it's
double so I think we can discount some of the biggest publishers counter data
by half from the get-go we also know that we've already paid for everything
from before today right when we walk into the room for a
lot of things and this isn't always true but I bet you for jigna tech and I'm
pretty confident UVA we've been pretty savvy in our
negotiations in the past and we've negotiated for a perpetual access at
least to the most important stuff and this is what California found they have
perpetual access to the things that they've been subscribing to in the past
so it's really important to know right if I don't write if I'm going in to buy
a car I need to know if I don't buy this car what are my options
right what can I do and when I'm going in to subscribe to a journal if I don't
buy this journal what do I have when I walk out the door and what I have is the
back files so every use that has to do with the back files shouldn't be counted
because I'm not paying for that right now
I already paid for that
I want to flip the foot the lens a little bit here so in the remaining uses
we're thinking about the things that were used not from the back files but
things that we're going to be used from the current year right so in an average
year so if we're going to million dollars a year that's right that's the
that's the denominator I want to know in an average year those that current year
uses we also know that there is an 8020 rule that applies to the journal journal
collections that is 80% of the uses can be accounted for by 20% of the titles in
the big deal you can get to 90% of the uses by going up to like 30 or 35% and
you can get to 95 by going to like 40% the remaining 60% of titles in several
of our big deal packages including Elsevier people look at less than once a
month and so we're paying for these titles
though they're in the deal right they're part of what we're allegedly getting in
this bundle and again we have to think about what happens if I back out of the
deal well I can buy those high use titles that's an alternative so the
advantage of the big deal over walking away and going Alucard is I get all this
low use stuff that I don't read well that's not really an advantage so I want
to take that out too right the low you stuff shouldn't count that's not an
advantage I can I can walk away and I can get the high you stuff ala carte
finally we've got open access and a recent study Heather people are adjacent
premium looking at the data from a a DOI and their own unpay wall tool they found
that for between 40 and 50 percent of the time when people were looking for
things using the unpaid wall tool they could find it in an open version right
so in the current talking about current material the stuff that we would be
paying for half of it is actually already available open access and so
that's what's left okay we're paying millions of dollars for the back part
not for the whole big chunk right now we can you know we can quibble right so
we're getting instant access we're getting a service we're getting a
certain kind of flawless frictionless access okay fine but if we're just
thinking about content how much content are we paying for if we factor in
alternative modes of access and what we've already bought that's really what
we're getting from the big deal and so that really changes the value
proposition when you think of it that way there are a lot of other
problems with cost per use there's a great a great article and I have a lot
of have a long liked reading list at the end that it's in the slides and the
slides will be made available for you a bibliography and it's a great article
called garbage and gospel out and it goes through these in some depth but
these are things that we know about how cost per use is calculated and problems
with it site design influences use and then some of these are sort of
explanations for publisher effect right so publishers who design their site for
example so that when you load up an article website the full text loads in
HTML they count that as a as a download like as an access that's one and then
you say well I need the PDF that's two whoa so sites who do that get double the
counts as sites that don't deep catalogs have an advantage right of course the
deeper you can go the more your cost per use is going to go down because you're
getting you know 50 to 75 years of back files usage practices vary by field
right different fields have different habits of grabbing literature so is it
more valuable if someone reads 100 articles in this field versus a
humanists that reads one book right it's hard to say diverse content types
so especially some of the most prestigious journals have like
editorials and little informative articles and reviews
lots of people read that stuff but is that comparable to an academic article
but you could cite to in a paper that would be productive for you hard to
say usage spikes right so if a professor assigns a special issue you know this
year we're going to be talking about this issue I want everyone in my class
and my seminar you read this issue and they they never sign it again oh my
goodness that year it looks like we really used a lot of that journal but
that's not a useless going to recur and so it can be hard to figure out which
windows usage spikes are meaningful and hard to even perceive them because they
get smoothed out over the course of the year's worth of data portfolios can be
volatile as titles move around right journals are bought and sold so it can
be hard to predict whether the things that were used last year are going to be
used again this year if Elsevier might be acquiring or divesting itself of
different journal titles we have aggregators that offer us alternative
modes of accessing these materials so as I'll harp on pretty heavily later on
cancelling a journal from this part of your collection actually doesn't mean
that it's nowhere it may mean somewhere else and it can be hard with costs
produced to know which things are completed
there are year-to-year fluctuations in quality in journals right sometimes you
just have a blockbuster year and sometimes you have a debt and then
finally and this is kind of a most important thing none of us has anything
to do with the work that the journal publishers to write the reason people
read this stuff is for the content and the content comes from us and it's
curated by us where the editors were the peer reviewers and so to the extent that
people are reading a whole lot of Elsevier journals that reflects very
well on the authors of those papers but I'm not sure
should reflect entirely a hundred percent on the editors of those on the
owner of that journal another important trend open access is on the rise this is
crucial this is so important this is I think one of the things that's really
driving the Europeans crazy is that they have made all these policy changes and
investments in open access and yet the cost of subscriptions has not budged one
inch how is it that more and more of the literature is free and yet you're
treating the subscription like it's worth the same as it ever was one I know
for a fact that I've been buying giant Swiss cheese holes out of the literature
with a PCS sometimes it's referred to as double dipping right I'm paying you a
subscription on the assumption that I'm getting you know fourteen articles like
I always did but it turns out seven of those authors paid a PCS to make it open
access well why am I not paying half as much anymore that's not the way it works
out it turns out there's there's a gravity that says the price must always
go up no matter what's and what's in the journal and how much of it is up in
access so the pressures that we're seeing plan s the kind of European
funders have banded together and said we're going to much more aggressively
push for open access again Oh a 2020 another European initiative funders the
open research funder group Gates Howard Hughes you know more and more of the
funders of scientific literature are committed to open access and so we know
that more and more scientific literature will be open access federal and state
policies are changing but we are not even this administration might
I hear word on the street we could see more better open access policies right
we could see embargoes getting shorter we can see more agencies adopt those
policies there is pressure on them to do that there is reason to believe they
will the National Academies of science has been hosting a roundtable and has a
multi-year project to align incentives for open science there's something in
the air that is going to make more and more literature open and so it just
feels kind of crazy to continue to pay as if everything is still behind a
paywall and here's some graphs that sort of show
those trends right this is P World War and cream have done an article not only
they first they did an article on the current state of open access and then
just a couple of weeks ago they were at least a preprint predicting what the
future should hold if these trends continue and so we can see that
projected articles are going to go up but I think much more important so we
can talk about how much of the literature is open access and people get
frustrated it's kind of stuffy and 13 30% it's gonna go up but what's really
interesting is the more impactful the literature is the more likely it is to
be open access so the literature you want the literature people are looking
for is more likely to be open access and so that's an important metric to think
about and finally diverging values this is the last pressure I love this quote
so much like I should you know get a tattooed
and land on my back or something but it's from the Budapest of an Access
Initiative this is kind of the initial original articulation of what open
access is about and I'm just gonna read it an old tradition and a new technology
have converged to make pop to make possible and unprecedented public good
the old traditions the willingness of scientists and scholars to publish the
fruits of their research and scholarly journals without payment for the sake of
inquiry and knowledge the new technology is the internet the public good they
make possible is the worldwide electronic distribution of the
peer-reviewed journal literature completely free and unrestricted access
to it by all scientists scholars teachers students and importantly other
curious minds right so this is the grand vision right and I think with not too
much nudging and explaining that ethos is shared in the Academy I don't think
it's a natural inclination in some ways to look to us the large extent so fast
forward a few years springer nature had a failed IPO they put themselves up for
a public offering and nobody did but you can look at the prospectus for that IPO
and see what they proposed their business strategy to be and one of the
things you can see is that they thought that open access would be a really great
business opportunity we were one of the first second emic publishers to embrace
the opportunity offered by open access it provides us additional opportunities
to generate revenues right that's open access is a new opportunity to generate
revenues because open actions publications are funded by authors and
their funders not library's new money right open access is a new pot of money
free money we found accordingly revenue stemming from ABCs
at least in the short to medium term are supplementary
right and this is back to my point they're not going to replace
subscription revenues no no no no no subscription revenues are gonna keep on
going up at the same rate and we'll get a PCS not cannibalistic some of our
journals are among the open access journals with the highest impact very
important providing us with the ability to charge higher APCs for these journals
than for journals with average impact factor so what we're seeing is on the
one hand the academics saying gosh we're all very idealistic and we want our
stuff to be free and the technology is going to make that possible and it's
really gonna be awesome and the ethos for this for Springer and
for the other commercial publishers is open access is going to be great because
it's free money that we'll take from another user it's not affiliated with
the current guy so we'll just get money on both sides life it's good right
that's a really divergent set of world views right it's a divergent set of
approaches to exactly the same phenomenon open access is a dream open
access is an awesome opportunity to get even more money and this is what a PC
prices have done using the kind of spring or model of monetizing journal
impact factor in the same way that they have with subscriptions it's completely
divorced this black line is our APCs and the blue and red lines are measurements
of inflation in year of the BLS and so this looks familiar
right it's a line that is going up untethered from the rest of the economy
it seems a lot like our the cereals crisis so what if we leave
what if we break up our big deals and choose a different model what does that
mean one thing I really want to emphasize is it doesn't mean you lose
access it doesn't mean you lose access it means the way you get access to
information changes right so you'll get access in in two ways you can get
instant access to information through their subscriptions we can still
subscribe to essential titles we can see where that line is actually the 95
percent wine or the 90 percent line or the 80 percent line depending on how
much we want to spend and we can draw that line and we can cover a lot of uses
just by subscribing to the titles that people really read of an access the
explosion you see an open-access is mirrored by an explosion in tools to
find open access we have more and better ways of finding the open versions of the
literature out there and so again and that is instant and freedom document
delivery believe it or not buying articles one at a time starts to make
financial sense when you look at how expensive the big deal really is and so
more and more if you look at LSU if you look at FSU the are the the libraries
that are leaving their big deals are budgeting some amount for buying
articles one by one and that's a way to provide instant access and for some
folks in some context that's important that's something that we can include as
part of our package or you can get delayed access delayed access by
interlibrary loan iõll can take between up to up to two days I'm not gonna lie
but sometimes it takes less than two hours it depends and those systems
can be improved and they are improving and so this is a you know a time-tested
library mechanism of subscribing to the stuff that you use and when somebody has
an interest that you don't cover in your library borrowing it from another
library it's fine we do that we can do that you can request it from the author
you can find it other places online that are legal I will not mention places
online that are not illegal so what happens if you don't get access it's
really interesting there's been as I said several libraries have been through
this right why again I love Montreal because they've been so good if you look
around been sent letter the air some of the other folks in the lead there you
can find they're writing up this literature and people people get turned
away sometimes people will get turned away and they don't make an Iowa request
they don't they don't ask for help they just disappear in fact the literature
has shown that on average if you have X number of uses of a title and then you
cancel it the number of IOL requests you'll get is between seven and nine
percent of X right so a lot of those people who use to get that stuff just
they they don't make a request they just go away in California
günther Wavell from you from California digital library just gave a talk about
what's happening there since they left Elsevier and the rate of IOL there is 2%
I don't know what's going on there I don't know what those folks are doing
but you know that's that's that's what's happening it's an interesting effect why
why you wanted it but you don't want it enough to IOL it I'm not sure there are
other ways as I say there are other ways to get things and we can't always
measure what those ways are and also again
some of the uses in cost per user probably think maybe some of that is
some of those uses those were inflated statistics in the first place but it's
hard to say but there is some number of folks who will not get what they were
looking for and that's definitely something we have to factor in okay so
let me tell my story real quick and then I'll take questions I'd love to talk so
big deals are journal bundles sold by the biggest journal vendors a global
consensus is favored and big deal reform more and more people are demanding that
we change the way we do this business big deals are very expensive and they're
taking over our budgets they're edging out other important content this is not
the question someone asked me recently when I was talking about this you know
if we cut some of those low use journals from time to time I might need one of
them and if I don't get it I don't cite it in my grand you know house I can
affect me and and I one of my responses was well if we don't cut the low use
Elsevier Journal well cut some other company's journal right it's not the
case that you're gonna get everything forever including all Elsevier if we
continue to keep all the big deals we'll have to cut other things that you'll
lose access to those things so there's not a world where nothing gets cut the
question is do we anoint big deals as uncuttable and saying the stuff at the
bottom end of the big deal even though it's less valuable than other things is
gonna ride the coattails of high-value stuff and be free from any
criticism their value is in decline alternative access has never been easier
and then the values of the biggest vendors are misaligned with ours sadly
but life goes on life goes on after big deals there's no world where you don't
get the research you need what happens is the way you get into this but that's
ok change is good lots of questions yes the
publishers are hearing all the same stuff from our side and are presumably
how do you read what's going on in the regulatory environment where politics is
played potentially playing a role in addition to the financial ability Asians
in the sense that we are not preparing to break so yeah it's interesting we
those of us at state institutions do have access right to state legislatures
who have a stake in this I mean this is Virginia taxpayer money when you
aggregate especially when you aggregate all of our public institutions the
investments get why on earth are we subsidizing the profit margins of a
Dutch multinational corporation with ten plus million dollars of Virginia
taxpayer dollars to buy back research that a lot of us wrote in the first
place yeah it's a compelling political case and we need to think about how to
make that case but on the other hand what's tricky we and we also we have
access to we have access to our legislators we have access to our
Attorney General's and so you know for a long time there's been a talk about
whether and how we could get them interested in like thinking about
antitrust is antitrust problem here because of the
massive market power of the publishers so there are things like that that we
can think about but on the other hand the publishers have a lot of money and
very sophisticated lobbying operations and so when you bring these kinds of
issues into the public policy arena if they find out that you're doing that
they show up with sort of briefcases full of money and it gets things get
harder so we have to be careful how we think about working in public policy
space but I think there are interesting options there
he's had a whole the entire system yeah
it's extraordinary and they have already done it and they actually they they left
in February it took elsevier until July to actually cut off their access but
they lost access in July to all sort of 2019 and forwarded Elsevier content and
so far so again in force 2019 at the keynote speech there last week they said
they've got ten complaints from faculty in the state of California and that
meanwhile they're about a thousand five signatories to that boycott Elsevier a
petition won't change the order so it's an interesting so far the politics are
with the libraries
I need the next step so the and this is a kind of universal
truth what a lot of us have got to do we are increasingly doing is this having
this conversation talking to our constituents talking to faculty students
our library colleagues and friends so that we begin to share what we know with
each other and kind of prepare ourselves and build a little bit of a consensus
you know frankly the the number one thing that I think has prevented action
in the past has been the sense that if we take a step against these big deals
if we cut access to content there'll be a revolt on campus pitchforks people
will show up in my office saying why don't we have the journals that we had
last week where they go and it's the only way to prevent that is to have a
conversation if we go into the negotiating room and we haven't had that
conversation we're in a really at position so this is the most
important thing we can do is just to start having these conversations and
that's been formalized in a lot of places in the form of a faculty Senate
resolution so what you've seen is at Florida State at Louisiana State last
last well earlier this week like two days ago Iowa State
these faculty Senate's are saying we hereby as faculty empower the library to
negotiate for journals using a different approach and those those resolutions I
think can be really powerful so we've started that conversation as well
another thing that we've done and you all are ahead of us way ahead of us and
so I'm looking forward to talking with with my counterparts here about this is
talking about our nothing access policy at UVA we don't have one we took a hard
run at it about 10 years ago and came up short and I think it's time to
try again as a part of increasing our leverage you know we want to push that
graph as high as we can because that's where our leverage comes from thank you
assume this right to be with in
you know then then the faculty feels somewhat protected because
our policy yet so even that if everybody in the country
decided to do that your Institute that then there would be a guarantee that all
but all the articles would exist in a repository somewhere in America so that
would could be one way that you could make it work
it's has been any attempt to create an open access policy for like you know
like he's on the subject matter like you know like the businesses
Association decided that they're going to have an open access policy and that
they will you know interview for about you
and that that society institutions attacks them
I'm not aware so so background right so an open access policy is a legally
speaking it's a Prophet's what we call a prior license it's a policy where the
faculty typically a faculty will vote in favor of this policy in the new
university will institute it and it says every faculty member at this institution
by virtue of having joined the faculty here grants to the institution a
non-exclusive license to make the pre-published you know final
peer-reviewed manuscript available in our repository right it's a legal right
that and it's a prior license meaning it's granted to us before they negotiate
with the journal and the journal can't take it away now they can they actually
they can they can force the author and this is part of the problem they can
force the author to waive the policy and may be new and that's part of the
problem of these policies but legally speaking the author could just sign the
agreement that says I give you all my rights and the journal publisher can
walk away with that agreement and it wouldn't matter we would still have the
license the prior license wins that's the legal doctrine we're relying on
anyway so those policies are really interesting
but unfortunately they're not self-enforcing and they're not
self-executing and so those policies have to be part of a strategy you have
to have some they're moving parts that you're willing
to put in place and then if I were talking to a scholarly society about
what they could do I wouldn't think about an open access policy per se but I
would think about a policy on evaluation promotion and tenure and I would I would
convince my you know my scholarly community that we're all going to
evaluate one another in ways that don't rely upon journal impact factor and
similar general level metrics and that's actually what Dora SF Dora that the
declaration on research assessment which is a great model is kind of a kind of a
declaration about this is we're going to assess research differently that was
actually created at a disciplinary conference I forget the discipline but
you know sort of like a physical sciences discipline like geology or
something they came up with that model and I think it's a great thing for
disciplines to do together to commit to an evaluation because the problem is
right UVA can say we're not going to worry about prestige journal titles
anymore but other people in your field are still worried about it you're stuck
at UVA forever now right or UVA won't be able to hire other people in the field
because we're not following what's normal in the field so it's actually
field is where changes in culture and evaluation can happen and that's where I
would focus on that kind of advocacy
Peter so go back to the
after yeah so I need to need to swear
because there's so many variables here a subscription
we do look at what Florida State has done
they're subscribing to now fractional
the more that institutions are to do this
dealing with
ghosts are gonna be changing and life after the big deal Elsevier's
going to be there they're not going to devolve
so
gave me now
yeah I agree I agree and one way I think about it in terms of game theory right
like thinking about you know what are the offers and counteroffers I don't
know if I should be saying this well
this is not a secret well so well let me just instead say I really like FIFA's
recent paper on general negotiations and ways to address vendors because one
thing that diva has proposed that I think is a great idea is for vendors who
don't give us offers we consider sustainable we have to make credible
threats of ever lower payments to them you know and so it can't be the case so
the concern is right oh we leave we go a la carte we go we pay you know we pay we
save three hundred thousand dollars in year one and all they knew is that in
year two or three they changed the ala carte pricing so everything costs four
hundred fifty thousand more and we're back where we were and I think we have
to be able to and willing to sort of tie ourselves to the mast and say you know
unless you give us a sustainable model we will just lower our spend and we
won't take the hit on access until you come back it's a it's a it's a delimited
version of the full walk away right California's doing that they're saying
we will give you nothing forever unless you give us what we want I think we can
give we can do also and one alternative that is in the Viva thing and may or may
not be something I want to personally do is to threaten a
or rate and so that the alternative yeah and I love this is I love the French
deal where year one goes down ten percent year to five four three three
and every year from there on now they're going to look for those d-- escalators
which again is so reasonable just look at how much of the literature is open i
mean in what world do we pay people when they're giving us less did we pay them
more I can't I can't imagine I can't imagine that could happen in any other
place than academia other questions yes
Elsevier with tax and brands right we know she would be
what was Springer actually so that was the Springer well no I'm sorry the
Cooper and deal yes that was Elsevier Elsevier went back now there is a view
there's some really interesting context for France and you've got a minute
France has like two or three things we don't have right Phoenix but like the
band's not the city but you know so but in the open access context they have a
couple things we don't have one thing they have is they bargain they bargain
after country level there is one bargaining unit France like represented
by an organization called coupon track which is hard to google because there
was a famous do make the meringue anyway so they bargain as one unit country
where they three things we don't have they bargain at the country level they
have a country level repository that everybody uses one repository everyone
in France uses that and they have a law that says a federal like French national
law that says every scholar in France can deposit their preprints and they're
their final alike the same kind of stuff we put in our our repositories right the
final of reviewed manuscript every author in France has a right under
federal law to do to deposit if you're in the stem field six months because of
the human isn't even in a longer twelve months for the humanists and that's a
right that they all have by law and what that gives the French universities is a
lot of leverage because what Elsevier wants actually is the exclusive right to
do analysis Tyrael they want to give us and they
want to give us the statistics and the kind of derivative data that you can get
by having all you know a monopoly on the body of research they don't want the
research to exist elsewhere because then other people can do text and data mining
on the research and compete with them so to them that was very valuable to have
exclusive access and control so what they did was they offered the lucubra
Ron you know we will comply with French law don't worry
six months 12 months whatever you get you get but let's do it on our servers
my dear sirs and so you can go and get preprints in France but you get them
from Elsevier and that means and that's for two two
years I think two to three years Elsevier keeps the preprints and that
gives them a big lean time advantage on the analytics business that they're in
right so if you want to know where are my scholars publishing how are they
doing all that kind of good stuff who should they be partnering with where
should we apply for grants all the stuff that Elsevier is trying to sell us in
our analytics they have a monopoly on that in France notwithstanding all of
the things that are lined up in favor of openness that leverages what make that
deal possible and we don't have that here right now that's part of why I
think open access policies are important because of its it's a tiny fraction of
that kind of French leverage
so you know so better ages and policies somewhere now
France you the White House do we have policies
where there's open access after 12 months to be
but you know anything else is going on
kind of talks are going legislating
so my understanding is there well so I mean as y'all may know there's been a
bill called faster that is intended to speed that up and that bills sort of
comes up and goes down every the last couple of the legislative cycles but my
understanding is also that the this administration believe it or not is open
to making that policy more pressing more lowering that embargo and making the
policy giving the policy more teeth I think that's a possibility that we may
see because it strangely you know I I found my when I was working in DC I was
in some weird places sometimes like I would find myself Robbie
Ted Cruz because sometimes the Republicans can see that kind of
taxpayer angle you know and so we actually have the sense of like why am i
paying for all this stuff and I can't get it
you know why is it all go into like Dutch corporate and they would what is
that so it's not a bad it's not a bad political case to make actually to
conservatives just as well as to the girls
I'm out he wants to give you some water you focus I did I'm sorry
that's a great question that's a great question
it's kind of both it's kind of both I mean to some extent it's a different in
degree they they so they just they just make by far and away more money than
anybody else and they sell more literature and people use their
literature more like they're at least in our statistics and I bet in yours too
you know they do have although one thing that's interesting to
me when we started so we've got data and y'all due to that that we've paid for
that's really interesting about who who's publishing where who's citing what
kinds of things are we using and is using it and the Elsevier usage is that
at UVA it's heavily concentrated in just like
three areas you know it's Health Sciences biomedical engineering and
engineering that's kind of it you know so if you go outside of those three
fields they couldn't care that much less about Elsevier you know when I've talked
to I've talked to I talked to a roomful of demons about this and the Dean and
architecture was like do whatever you want with Elsevier their journals suck
in my field you know and so it's a it's a very localized phenomenon and it's
another thing that makes me doubt this whole cost per use philosophy because I
think it's not only not only are the uses highly concentrated in just these
three disciplines but those are three disciplines that I believe I have a
reason to assume based on the statistics might use things differently than other
people that is maybe they download like lots more articles / it takes sort of a
hundred and fifty downloads to make a journal article in the Health Sciences
and it takes you know when I was in philosophy it took about three books you
know so it's a very different kind of research ecosystem and Elsevier in some
ways kind of hit the lottery by targeting finding and catering to the
highest use of most intense research fields so they are different in that way
again we think about Taylor and Francis is sage with Germany's preeminence what
are the differences that we whether librarians or scholars on the outside
the libraries take into account you think about those those babies or so
we're not just shifting the burden for those either off onto to other
publishers whether their deals are whether they're the society publishers
who are having a hard time well that's really interesting so one thing that is
happening in terms of sort of a market you know what's what about what are all
these global pressures causing we want one interesting thing that's happening
is that some publishers want to be the good guy in this story right it's
obvious who we think is the bad guy and they're not just bad because they're big
and rich I mean that's pretty good for me I mean you know Honore de Balzac said
behind every great fortune is a great crime but you know leaving my socialist
had at home like they're also just meaning sometimes right like I've worked
in DC like there's they're harsh they show up all the time to crush anything
you know they are much more aggressive the LSU lawsuit right they they they
would not take service from LSU OSU tried to sue them over a contract issue
and they fought tooth and nail LSU showed up to serve process on them
in New York and they said oh no no no you must use a UN process and serve us
in the Netherlands you know they're just they just play hardball
so they deserve that reputation and I think other publishers don't have that
because they're not that they not quite as mean frankly like but at the same
time other publishers have have problems and upsides as well and so the upside of
all of this is that some publishers won't do as I said want to be the good
guy in this story and so you're seeing more and more stories and I think it was
yesterday who was it oh gosh I think Springer struck a new
deal with a big Springer Wiley Cambridge University Press
they have all come forward and said well you know if you want an open-access read
and publish deal Elsevier's not being very reasonable but we can be quite
reasonable and so there's an interesting competition thing happening there and I
think we have to be careful that we get good deals you know they show up and
they act like the good guy but is this really a sustainable model again
thinking at a PC curve that's not the elsevier
curve that's the whole ecosystem everybody's a PCs are going up like that
so it's it's it's dangerous but if you do have more questions for him I want
you to come up and talk to him afterwards we have lots and lots of food
and drinks and they actually the cookies and oat bars chocolate oat bars got here
after it started they got here late so please partake in that because it came
from bolos and it's really delicious and should go eat them because we paid for
them and they're good food yes so go and eat or grab something and go that's
totally fine and you can come and speak to him but we want to give him a break
too because he's been talking all day long and yeah thank you again for
everybody for coming and his things