T. Scott

The Caricature of Taypayer Access

I am avidly following the discussion about public access on the OSTP blog and I see this morning that of the 26 new comments that have come in overnight, 21 are from Harnad.  Sigh.  "Bless his heart," as we say in the South.  I applaud the folks at OSTP for trying to be as open and inclusive as possible, but is this really any way to have a reasoned discussion?  I would hate to have to be the person who's got to read through all of this stuff and try to figure out if it actually reflects any consensus of opinion.

Hardly anyone that I talk to disagrees with the general abstract principle that the public should have ready access to the results of federally funded research.  But that's not really what all the heat is about.  What SPARC and its legions claim is that the public should have free access to the peer reviewed literature that results from federally funded research.  This is quite a different thing, and SPARC has been extremely effective at papering over that critical distinction.

There's the expected amount of publisher bashing in the comments of course, best illustrated, perhaps, by Evans Boney's "overview of what happens in peer-reviewed research:"

1- SCIENTISTS spend weeks preparing a grant proposal and sometimes get a grant, likely paid for by citizens of the USA.
2- SCIENTISTS do the research.
3- SCIENTISTS submit a paper to their peers
4- these other SCIENTISTS review these papers and send back comments.
5- PUBLISHERS claim a copyright on the result of the SCIENTISTS work and make the money that should rightly belong to the people who did the research. This money comes from subscriptions paid by libraries which, at public universities, are ALSO paid for by citizens. PUBLISHERS add two extra costs to the public at large, and are entirely worthless and burdensome to today’s scientific structure.

What one would logically conclude if this were actually the case, is that scientists should quit sending their articles to established journals, and simply organize their own peer review mechanisms and post their papers on their own.  Problem solved. 

Alas, this description is an ignorant caricature, although one that passes for reality among far too many of my colleagues in libraryland.  Even on a very small scale (for example, my experience with the four slender issues a year of the JMLA) there is a tremendous amount of labor involved in getting something from manuscript to published article, and then in getting that to the attention of the people for whom it will be useful, labor that is completely unacknowledged in the silly simplification that Evans presents. 

The advocates for public access mandates implicitly recognize this, of course.   It is the post-peer review articles that they want made publicly available.  They'd like the final published paper, of course, but those damned copyright laws prevent them from just taking those -- so they'll settle for the final peer-reviewed manuscript, which, they claim, the publisher doesn't quite have the rights to yet (although the fact that the NIH policy requires that the written agreement between the publisher and the author allow Pubmed deposit indicates that maybe the publisher does have some kind of a claim after all... but we'll try to avoid going there...).  One gets a headache from trying to follow the tortured logic.  So much easier to just raise the banner of "taxpayer access!"

So I'm left with this conundrum:  if what the publisher provides is so valuable that no mandate urges making papers available that don't have the benefit of it, how do we justify taking that value (and diminishing the value to the publisher who provided it) without giving something in return?  Conversely, if what the publisher provides is of no value at all, why don't the mandates suggest that we simply bypass the publisher altogether?

(As a postscript, I feel compelled to add that I do believe that the public should have unfettered access to the peer-reviewed results of federally funded research.  Indeed, I think that all of the peer-reviewed scientific literature should be made freely available.  After all, one of the professional accomplishments of which I am most proud is having played a part in making the content of the JMLA freely available -- the first library journal that did so.  I just think that we need to develop policies that do a much better job of acknowledging and accounting for the contributions made by publishers.  I don't think that the taxpayer access argument, in the simplistic form in which it is usually stated, is intellectually honest.  Evans Boney may not know any better, but surely many of the others who make that same case do).

Stewardship

"Trust is the only important thing!"   Slightly hyperbolic, but I knew what Geoff was getting at.  We were talking at the end of the CrossRef 10th anniversary dinner about the various projects under development at CrossRef in support of their mission:

CrossRef is a not-for-profit membership association whose mission is to enable easy identification and use of trustworthy electronic content by promoting the cooperative development and application of a sustainable infrastructure.

I'd be speaking the next day on issues surrounding the development of sound policies for handling plagiarism and duplication of publication.  The Baroness Onora O'Neill, Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge, would speak on "Trust, Communication and Academic Publication."  Heady stuff.  (The slides for the presentations are now all available on the CrossRef site).

While issues surrounding the protection of the integrity of the scientific record were front and center at the CrossRef meeting, the same themes permeated all of the various venues in which I found myself engaged with publishers throughout the summer and fall, be it with the Scholarly Communication Roundtable, the STM meeting in Frankfurt, the publishing panel we put together for the NLM/AAHSL Leadership Capstone, or the Chicago Collaborative meeting in Boston.  The fact is, serious publishers of all stripes, be they large or small, commercial or not-for-profit, spend a helluva lot of time worrying about ensuring not just the integrity of the single article before them, but the ongoing stewardship of that article. 

Stewardship involves not just shepherding a manuscript through the peer review process -- there are issues of image manipulation, unintentional errors or violation of publication norms through ignorance or cultural differences, the challenges of dealing with post-publication updating, errata, error, fraud,  retraction and preservation.  In our focus on access, librarians tend to ignore most of this.   Is it that we think these issues are unimportant or trivial?  Or do we just not think about them at all?

Of course access is important, but as Professor O'Neill pointed out in her talk (done without slides, so not, alas, reflected in the presentations that are available online), access is not sufficient -- what we're really after is communication.  And ensuring communication requires that we pay adequate attention to integrity and to stewardship. 

Librarians haven't put enough energy into those aspects of the discussion, and we need to.

Public Private

When I first went to work at the National Library of Medicine you couldn't get a password to search Medline until you'd been trained.  They'd gotten it down to a basic three days, plus a couple of days for the specialized databases -- a week altogether.   A decade or so earlier, it took three months.  No, I am not making this up.

You had options.  Although no private company would've built Medline, there were several that were eager to provide access.  BRS had been formed by some of the people who'd been involved in the original MEDLARS project.  When I was in library school, DIALOG was the big dog in the bibliographic database market, with a portfolio of more than a dozen databases.   But Medline was the first -- when it came up in 1972 1971, it was the first publicly available bibliographic database in the world.  But "publicly available" didn't mean you could just come in.  NLM licensed the database to independent companies, but with plenty of restrictions -- required training being one of them.

Searching Medline (MEDLARS On Line -- the original project had been MEDical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System) was cheapest if you went directly to NLM.  By law, they couldn't charge more than the actual cost of providing access.  You paid by the minute, so a librarian spent a good bit of

time before dialing up working out the search strategy so as to be as efficient as possible.  The companies had to make money, so they had to charge more, so they had to build fancier search engines, had to offer additional services to draw customers.  And they were very successful.  They hated the fact that they had to compete with "the government".  But if the government hadn't built the database in the first place, they wouldn't have existed.

This was all pre-internet.  (Remind me to tell you sometime about my experience with the first IBM XT personal computer purchased by NLM's Bibliographic Services Division).  So you dialed into a commercial telecommunications company (NLM had contracts with two), and linked into the database.  Lots of people made money off of that government investment. 

I was there when access was opened up to physicians.  Without training.   Highly controversial within the organization.  At the time, I was the assistant editor of the NLM Technical Bulletin, the newsletter that was sent monthly to everyone with an access code.  In the course of a year, the number that we sent out increased by a factor of ten.

One of my projects at the end of my Associate year was to investigate whether or not videodiscs (twelve inch platters encoded in an analog format) would be a good vehicle for distributing information in the event of toxic waste spills.  They weren't, but in the course of my investigations I became aware of the five inch "compact optical discs" that Phillips & Sony had recently developed and were trying to find a commercial use for.   I calculated the number of discs that would be required to hold the entire MEDLINE database and suggested, in the formal presentation that capped the year, that they could be used as a distribution medium.  It seemed pretty far-fetched, but I thought it was a fun idea.

The commercial outfits always complained about competition from NLM.  One of the ironies of capitalism is that while competition is the essential engine, every capitalist hates competitors.  And having the government as a competitor is worst of all.  But NLM never put anybody out of business, and the investments that were made in MEDLARS and MEDLINE were the foundation of the search industry. 

It was a government agency that developed the internet in the first place.  The Defense Department wanted a communications network that could survive a nuclear attack.  Tim Berners-Lee worked for a government funded organization when he invented the world wide web.

So it's hard for me to get too freaked out about government intrusions into the marketplace.  Public health insurance option putting private companies out of business?  I don't think so.  Public access to federally funded research destroying the STM industry?  Probably not.

Colleagues and Mountains

Each MLA Chapter has its own, very distinctive, personality that informs the tone of its annual conference.  There are superficial similarities -- everybody has a keynote address, usually there are contributed papers, there's a business meeting at some point.  But the intangible essence of what the members go to the conference for and what they hope to get out of it can be strikingly different.  Lynn sees this more acutely than most, since she generally gets to at least three or four different chapter meetings each fall. 

Midcontinental, which covers the largest geographic area but has fewer members than most chapters, prides itself on its informality and its frontier spirit.  These people cherish the mountains and the high plains.  For some of these librarians, this is the one time of the year that they get to hang out with colleagues, and the relaxed meeting schedule reflects that, with long breaks and plenty of unscheduled time.

Which is not to imply that the program is an afterthought.  This year, in particular, the program committee's done a superb job, with a real heavy-hitter as the keynote speaker this morning (which is why I'm up and getting ready to hit the shower even though it was close to two in the morning by the time we finally got to bed after the late drive in from Denver).  T.R. Reid is one of the most knowledgeable and sensible writers on the state of healthcare in America today.  If the angry mobs at the Town Hall meetings would stop shouting themselves blue in the face and take a few minutes to pay attention to some of the facts that he is so good at presenting, we might be actually having a sensible debate about what we should be doing as a nation.  Sigh.

Anyway, it'll be a real treat to hear him speak and to spend some time in the company of a small, but passionately dedicated group of colleagues.  With mountains as a backdrop.  And snow!

Breckenridge Again

Lisa says the snow in Breckenridge is beautiful.  She sent a picture. 

I'm plenty eager to get out of the swamp that Alabama has turned into these past couple of weeks.  Endless rain, temperatures in the mid-eighties.  The sun struggles to clear a bit of sky every afternoon but the thick gray clouds are too much for it.  We get up every morning to look out the window and see if the lake is splashing over the dock yet.

Twenty-one years ago tomorrow I was at NLM presenting the results of our evaluation of MEDLINE on CD-ROM -- a radically new concept at the time.  It was there that I first spoke about the "inept, but satisfied, end-user."  I flew straight from DC to Colorado and while sitting on a panel just a couple of days later, heard the woman sitting next to me use the same phrase, which she'd heard "just last week at NLM."  It apparently escaped her that she'd heard it from me.

That's when I figured I'd better write it up.  The brief essay appeared in Medical Reference Services Quarterly the following spring and has by far the most citations in Web of Science of anything else I've ever written.  In Australia a couple of weeks ago, Diane mentioned that she still uses the essay in the classes she teaches.  I'm proud of it, and amused.  Who'd've imagined that tossed-off phrase would have such staying power?

I'd flown over the Appalachians a few times by then, but I'd never seen the Rockies.  In the van on the way from the Denver airport I was quiet, just watching the scenery.  My first morning in Breckenridge, when I first opened my eyes, I looked out the window to see the mountains touched by the dawn light.  And I lay there, for a long time, without moving, as the light crept up the hills, changing the colors from purple to orange to gold.  I hadn't known until that very moment that "purple mountains majesty" wasn't a poetic image.  Just a literal description.

It was my second MCMLA meeting and I was beginning to make some of the friendships that have lasted now for decades.  That was the year I met MEY on the dance floor.   I was wearing a shiny green sharkskin suit and red deck shoes.  It is fortunate that few pictures survive from those days.

As far as I knew at the time, I was quite happily married.  And yet it was only seven years later that Lynn and I got married at an MCMLA welcome reception (we were even listed in the program).  In twenty-two years I've only missed one meeting, choosing to go to Brazil for the ICML congress in 2005.  Last year we had to leave Cody early, when the call came about Lynn's mom, but I still count it as having been there.

It's the perfect blend of professional and personal.  A few years ago, when I got to the registration table, I found there'd been some kind of a mixup and they'd never received my payment.  The woman at the desk gave me the registration packet anyway,  saying, "Oh, nevermind.  We know you're here every year."   Of course.

Getting It Right

The MEDLIB-L discussion list has been tremendously valuable over the years, particularly for solo librarians.   But it's frustrating as well, and probably spreads as much misinformation as enlightenment.   Case in point, last week:

A question is posted to the list wondering if it is true that if physicians provide their personal copies of journals to the library, "we can't add them to our catalog, bind them, etc."  I'd written a JMLA editorial years ago on the topic, so I responded by referencing that, and pointed out that once a gift has been made to the library (assuming the gift is legitimate), the library can treat that material the same way that it treats material acquired in any other fashion (we've had that point verified by University counsel several times).

Later in the day, the original poster put up a summary thanking people for the many replies received and including this nugget:

Gifts should not be lended, or included in SERHOLD, Docline or other consortial list.  (even here there is some disagreement, with some asserting that gifts are the library's and should be used how we see fit, and others asserting that it would violate copyright to provide materials that we don't in fact own)

This isn't a matter of disagreement.  Somebody is wrong.

So I posted a polite follow-up, asking for more discussion from the people who feel that gifts should not be lent.  I really wanted to know what some people thought the copyright issues were.  I think they're wrong, but I thought it would be useful to get some kind of explanation for that view.

Alas.  There were two subsequent posts, both agreeing with what I'd said.  Nothing from whoever it might've been whose replies to the original request had resulted in the item in the summary.  Presumably, those whoevers would've seen my follow-up, but for whatever reasons, chose not to respond, either to the list or to me individually.   I assume they weren't very confident about the veracity of their answers.

So the original question remains unanswered, but the summary now sits there in the list archives.  I can forsee the question coming up again, when some librarian is having a conversation with colleagues about how to handle gifts.   "It's okay to accept them, but it's a copyright violation to lend them.  I saw that on MEDLIB-L."

Folklore.   We base way too many of our policy decisions on library folklore.

OA and Library Lit: Methodology

Even with all of the enthusiastic support for open access among librarians, relatively little of the LIS literature is openly available.   Perhaps there is some delicious irony in the fact that a self-described "open access heretic" such as myself was the editor of the Journal of the Medical Library Association when it became fully open access back in 2000 -- the first major LIS journal to do so.

Despite the manifest problems with Jason Griffey's 2004 master's paper, it was effective in highlighting the fact that virtually all of the ALA-associated journals were closed.  Now, Doug Way has released a paper on "The Open Access Availability of Library and Information Science Literature" that indicates that the situation has improved little in the five years since Griffey posted his paper.

Of course I scanned the paper immediately to be sure that the JMLA was included and to find out what he had to say about it.  My interest was immediately piqued by "Table 2: Percentage of OA articles by journal" which says that 94% of JMLA articles are OA.  What?  All of the JMLA is OA.  All of it.  Every page.  Back to 1898.  What gives?

Turns out to be a methodological issue.  Way is not actually measuring OA availability; he's measuring the degree to which Google Scholar is effective in identifying OA versions of articles from his set of twenty LIS journals.  If I'm calculating the math back correctly, he identified 68 research articles published in the JMLA during 2007, and was only able to identify 64 of them using Google Scholar.  I'm dying to know which four didn't show up!

But that percentage was better for JMLA than for the two other OA journals that Way identifies.  Google Scholar found only 70% of the articles in Law Library Journal and only 68% of those in College and Research Libraries. 

This methodological confusion pervades the discussion section, and one has to read carefully to keep things straight.    For example, Way says that, "No journal, including the three OA journals included in this study, had OA versions for 100% of their articles."  In fact, what he means is that Google Scholar was not successful in finding all of the OA versions actually available.  I know that Google Scholar failed to identify 6% of the OA articles in the JMLA.   And it appears that it failed to identify about 30% of those in the other two OA journals (unless those journals are not, in fact, completely OA).

If I had been editing this article, I probably would have tried to put the brakes on his conclusions somewhat.  (This was, by the way, the number one editing issue that I had when I was working with the JMLA -- authors claiming more than their results actually showed).    His results show that Google Scholar is not a completely reliable means for identifying OA versions of articles.    It is probably also safe to conclude that fewer than 50% of the articles published in the non-OA journals have an openly available version, but the specific numbers that he presents should be approached sceptically.

One other point about the JMLA.  Way mentions that all of the OA versions that Google Scholar identified were "found in PubMed Central and not on the journal's Web site."  This is completely unsurprising, since the JMLA does not have a separate journal website.  Except for a very few early release articles, the electronic versions exist only on PMC.

Despite these quibbles, the larger point that Way makes is indisputable -- for all of the advocacy work that librarians have done in support of various OA initiatives, they have not done a very good job of making their own research output widely available and easily discoverable.    Our advocacy efforts would be more persuasive if we were taking a more aggressive leadership role within our own field.

Halfway Round the World

Alas, when people gather to share stories about the horrors of airplane travel, we'll have nothing to share about our flight home from Brisbane.   Everything was on time, all of the gate agents and flight attendants were friendly and good natured.  Economy class on V Australia turned out to be every bit as comfortable as advertised, and Lynn had some fun conversation with the guy sitting next to her, who was on his way to LA to meet, for the first time in person, his internet girlfriend of nine months.  We watched movies, had some pretty good food, slept for a bit.  I did a lot of writing.

We breezed through immigration and customs and transferred our luggage.  Stopped for a cappuccino, and then on to the Sky Club to check email and have a bloody mary.  It was early morning in LA, and just after midnight in Brisbane (our flight left Brisbane at 11:00am on Sunday and arrived in LA at 6:45am on Sunday.  I love that.)

I'd already upgraded us to first class for the flight from LAX to Atlanta, so we had lunch on the plane.  More reading and writing and another hour long nap.  A short layover in Atlanta, then home.

Halfway around the world in 24 hours. 

I was trying to explain to someone who'd not been to an ICML conference before what was different about this gathering from other meetings of librarians.  I said that, first of all, the people who came to this meeting had a shared concern for global health issues and, in particular, the challenges of getting good health information to people in developing countries. They have an expansive view of the role of librarians.  And secondly, the people who came to this meeting really wanted to be here, and most of them had gone to some personal expense and trouble to be able to make it.  Even with the global economy in the state that it is, there were some 500 delegates from 45 countries gathered.  So it's very different from the typical domestic regional or even national meeting where many of the people are there just out of habit -- they go every year and are mostly interested in seeing their friends and checking out the local restaurants.  Of course, seeing friends and checking out local restaurants was a very important part of this meeting as well.  As was finding new friends. 

The meeting was incredibly well organized.  The keynote sessions were uniformly excellent, from Jeff Drazen doing a brilliant kickoff that provided considerable insight into the challenges of putting out a top-tier journal, to Ian Frazer on the critical role that librarians have to play in addressing health challenges in developing countries, to Brian Fitzgerald, at the session that I chaired, doing a rapid-fire overview of the intellectual property issues swirling around open access, the Google book settlement, patents in the digital world, and the opportunities for collaborative drug development.   The contributed papers & posters covered an extensive array of subjects, and I have to give particular credit to the presenters for whom delivering a paper in English was a considerable challenge and who had the courage to rise to meet it.

Conference support was superb.  The Bearded Pigs even had a professional sound & light crew for our performance at the gala dinner.  With Malcolm up in the rafters monitoring everything, I'm sure we have never sounded as good (and likely never will again).  There were still a half dozen dancers on the floor when we finally wrapped it up at 11:30.

Oh, I suppose we'll tell the story about one suitcase being delayed for a day on our way in, and the tale of our poor lost cab driver who took two hours to get us to our hotel from the airport (typically a twenty minute drive) will be good for the telling.  But right now, after getting a good seven and a half hours of sleep and waking up at my normal time on a Monday morning, I've got nothing but good things to say about international travel.    Americans really ought to do more of it.

Value and Librarian Decision-Making

I was on the phone with  my Elsevier rep last year.  He was giving me the standard spiel about the tremendous value that ScienceDirect was bringing to my institution, in an attempt to talk me out of stepping away from the big deal.  Finally, I interrupted.  "It's not that you're wrong," I said.  "It's just that this isn't relevant to the situation I'm in."

"Look," I continued.  "If  Lynn and I go down to Jim & Nick's for dinner, we might spend $50 and have a really good meal.  If we go to Hot n' Hot, I might spend $200 for an exceptional experience.  I might feel that the $200 actually represents a better value overall, but if all I've got to spend on dinner is $20, the comparison is irrelevant.   The point is, I'm just not willing to spend what you're asking, no matter how valuable you tell me the content is."

He still seemed pretty surprised some weeks later when he finally got our order and we'd done exactly what we said we were going to do. 

Librarians in general have not been terribly good negotiators.  Too often, what passes for negotiating is to plead poverty and beg for the percentage increase to come down a couple of points.  A good sales rep knows this, and past evidence demonstrates that, with very few exceptions,  librarians will always plead that they can't afford it,  but somehow they always come up with the money. 

This year, in the face of an economic downturn more severe than working librarians have ever known, the pleas of poverty have gotten louder.  And some publishers have responded by announcing price freezes.  Whether or not those publishers hope to be able to recoup in future years by instituting compensating price increases remains unknown.

Librarians have expressed gratitude to those publishers, but an exchange on liblicense-l this week highlights the question of the degree to which that gratitude will be translated into action.  Will librarians "reward" publishers that freeze their prices and "punish" those that come up with price increases, even if those increases stay within the normal ranges that we've come to expect?  Or will librarians do what they've always done and eventually make their decisions based on what they believe they can't do without, regardless of the pricing structure?  Joe Esposito speculates that if the latter is true,

it may be in the interests of a publisher of the higher quality publications to raise prices even in desperate economic times, as such a publisher is protected by the armor of outstanding editorial content and can stand by and watch as the weaker editorial products get cancelled, despite the generous trading practices of those unfortunate publishers.

So if I'm a gutsy publisher, who believes that my content is the stuff that libraries can't do without, this may be a golden opportunity to further weaken the competition.

Whether that turns out to be a good gamble or not depends on what librarians do over the next couple of months as they make decisions for 2010.  The major commercial publishers have done a very good job of betting that when push comes to shove, librarians will always come around, no matter how much they fuss.

As far back as my first AAHSL meeting in 1987, I've been listening to librarians say that publishers have got to change their pricing practices because the current system is simply not sustainable.  And yet, librarians have done a very good job of sustaining it.

I wonder if that will turn out to be the case again this year.

Getting things done

Rod asks perceptive questions.  We've been having a good time.  He's been here this week for his second site visit as part of our participation in the NLM/AAHSL Leadership Fellows program.  During his first week, back in April, we tried to structure the week to give him a broad overview of the library and its relationships to the rest of the university.  This week we've been digging in more depth into how the library itself runs, so we've had long and intense discussions about budget and personnel issues and strategic planning and all of the things involved in moving the organization forward.

"Don't let perfection or 'better' be the enemy of good."  My colleague, Jim Shedlock, uses this phrase as the tagline on his sig file.  It indicates a theme that Rod and I have returned to many times this week. 

I'm often grateful that I'm not a perfectionist.  Like the quest for perfect information in decision making, the impulse towards getting things exactly right can be paralyzing.  Or at the very least, time wasting.

We've been talking about how to achieve that delicate balance of engaging all of the members in a group, getting all of the opinions and issues on the table, and then deciding which to take into account and which not, in order to keep things moving.  Time and again I've seen situations where, in the quest for perfect consensus, the desire to accommodate the opinions or concerns of a single member of the group end up either derailing the process altogether or, at best, resulting in a solution which is actually not as effective as it might have been, had it not been for the desire to adjust the result for that single individual.

It's a very difficult judgment call on the part of the leader.  If you don't accommodate every objection or issue, you run the risk of having members of the group feel that their views are being insufficiently respected, and that can sabotage your group process altogether.  And sometimes, the views of that outlier might be exactly the brilliant idea that is needed.  On the other hand, trying to come to perfect consensus all too often leads to the result found when trying to "write by committee."  By the time everybody's edits have been incorporated, the document is a stilted, bloated, caricature of what might have been.

There's no magic formula that tells you (the leader) what to do in these cases.  You rely on experience, good listening, asking the right questions, and an intuition for when it's the right time to pull the plug and move on.   You hope that you'll get it right more often than not, but the fact is you're going to get it wrong sometimes too. 

Fortunately for me, I'm comfortable with that.  It's good enough.

It'd kill a perfectionist.