E-journal overlays/consortial or institutional repositories

[brs4@lehigh.edu]

Rick, thanks for the comments. Also, thanks to Ann Okerson, who has
suggested that I look at an additional item in Against the Grain, by Gerry
McKiernan, June 2004. I'll look for a copy of it. I'll be happy to "batch"
and post bibliography to the listerv, if more bibliographical suggestions
come in.

Here are some additional thoughts. I'm engaging in this exercise to focus
my thinking on all this, fully realizing that it may well recap comments
made many times by others. (Thus the request for bibliography).

The idea here is a gradualist model, what might be called an integrated
repository/journal overlay model, following Ann's use of the word overlay
as a subject for this discussion.  In this model, repositories would play
a growing role over time in storing and providing access to literature.

The "regulative ideal" (to use a term with a Kantian ring) would be to
achieve a world in which all journal literature would be stashed in
institutional/consortial repositories, and where journals would be
entities that provide credentialing, through a seal of approval of its
articles across those repositories, that have met the its standards of
publication. Journals would maintain a distinct identity by virtue of
providing a portal webage to items cached at institutional repositories.  
Plus authors submitting items to them, as in the currrent model, would
have to observe the m.s. formatting requirements of a particular journal.

All items in the repositories, and at the journal websites that would give
links to those items that have their seal of approval, would be available
on an open access basis. (Introducing for-pay access in such an
environment would get horrendously complicated.)

The web or server costs for the journal's portal page could be quite
nominal:  just a webpage with links. Of course the webpage could be
spruced up in various ways, but the costs for doing so could also be
nominal. There would be significant logistical costs for the editorial
board's work.  Those costs would be handled by consortia or individual
universities, or by societies, including ones wanting the "cachet" of
being identified with particular prestigious journals. Perhaps some of the
costs here could be cut down by assigning the logistical aspects of
editorial work to graduate students.

There are real benefits for academic institutions or consortia willing to
take this on. (It may prove that consortia, rather than individual
colleges or universities, would best handle all this eventually, to take
advantage of economies of scale.) Here are some benefits:

--Yes it would cost, and cost a lot, but so do electronic journals under
the current model. The idea is to give colleges and universities control
over the literature they produce, including handling the long-discussed
archival issues, rather than be subject to the pricing of the highly
inelastic commercial ejournal market.

--By virtue of institutions or consortiums taking on this endeavor, there
would be pressure from provosts or other academic administrators to do all
this efficiently. That would be a good thing.

--Professors at member universities in a consortium could easily track,
through an interface for that consortium, what their colleagues at other
member institutions are doing.  Also, consortia could be compared readily
in terms of their contribution to research inspecific subjects.  All this
could create a salutary competitive situation that would spur research.

How to make all this practicable? Here are a few ideas about how to do
this in a *gradualist* way.

A trial run of this model would be done by some open access journals
willing to participate. Perhaps a society publisher would be willing to
try this out, or a journal maintained at a university. Of course, the
candidates would probably not come from societies that use their journal
(and publishing operations generally) to fund membership.

The participating open access journals would provide two options for
author submission. One would be to require author payment, as with those
open access journals that now require a submission fee. A second option
would be to waive, or greatly reduce, that fee if the author's
institutional or consortial archive were to handle the posting, storage,
and maintenance of the author's paper. The participating open access
journals would then consist of a mix of articles submitted on either
basis. The journal's website would then either provide links to articles
housed in other repositories, or at that website itself.

The payment by authors of fees (under one of the two options that would be
available) could provide a revenue stream to help tide things over until
an organized institutional or consortial archival infrastructure were more
firmly in place in the U.S. and until the mechanics of the proposed scheme
are tried and ironed out.

If a few participating journals were successful, might this have the
helpful effect of encouraging (even if derivatively) the further
development of institutional or consortial archives?

Persons with vested interests in the current electronic model of journal
publishing will of course regard the various schemes under discussion as
woefully impracticable and utopian for one million one reasons.

On the other hand, it is only if academic institutions are willing to
engage in Schumpeterian innovation and risk-taking that the current crisis
in serials pricing will be overcome.

A few final thoughts. It is only if more high-level academic
administrators (e.g., provosts, university presidents) and more scholars
who produce research (only for it to be resold to their employers!) take
an interest in these issues that the infrastructural developments proposed
above will prove possible.

Librarians are relatively limited in their capacities to do anything about
the crisis in serials publishing, though we are the ones who waste (yes,
waste)  lots of time creating spreadsheets of journal deaccession
candidates, to be read by the understandably unhappy faculty with whom we
deal.

Along these lines, has anyone calculated the costs to academic employers,
and the opportunity costs, of having librarians spend so much time
creating these spreadsheets, and of having professors review them? Not to
mention the endless rounds of discussions among administrators about how
to allocate money to handle spiralling costs of journals?

Brian Simboli

P.S. original message posted below:

Date:  Fri, 16 Jul 2004 19:40:18 EDT 
From:  Brian Simboli <brs4@Lehigh.EDU> 
Reply-to:  liblicense-l@lists.yale.edu 
Subject:  Re: Authors and OA (RE: Mandating OA around the corner) 
A question about below.

Couldn't there be a credentialling body for a specific subject that would
give the "seal of approval" for selected articles in institutional
archives? So an article in an institutional repository could be labelled
"this article has received the xyz seal of approval", where xyz is say a
society committee, or an editorial board along traditional lines. The
institutional repositories could be centralized for long-standing and
stable consortia, such that faculty at member institutions in that
consortium could submit articles to the centralized repository. It would
be up to the author to get the seal of approval from xyz. Once they do so,
they would submit the article, marked with that approval, to their
consortial archive, and that would be that in terms of author involvement.
A and I resources and webpages for the approving body (xyz)  could give
organized access to all the articles, spread across institutional
repositories across the land, that have that particular seal of approval.

Brian Simboli
Lehigh University