North American Serials Interest Group (NASIG) Conference : A Serials Odyssey
The 16th Annual North American Serials Interest Group (NASIG) conference was held 23-26 May at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. Like its predecessors, this NASIG conference featured thought provoking plenary,concurrent, and workshop sessions on production, acquisition, cataloging, and use of print and electronic serials.
Scholarly Communication from the Author/Producer Perspective
Steven Bachrach, Distinguished Professor of Chemistry at Trinity University and editor of the Internet Journal of Chemistry, spoke at NASIG's opening plenary on "Scholarly Communication from the Author/Producer Perspective: A Critical Examination of Scholarly Publication in Chemistry". Bachrach traced current communication in chemistry from its origins in paper-based publishing by societies and noted that it is somewhat remarkable chemists are "still using eighteenth century media to communicate." In their communication systems,chemists want quality science, peer review, widespread distribution, and perpetual access, which Bachrach joked "doesn't mean we want to read someone's article from 50 years ago; it means we want someone to be able to read our articles in 50 years." Chemists also want reasonably rapid publication, but they are less concerned with speed than high-energy physicists and tolerate three to nine month delays in publication.
Like all scholarly communication, chemical communication is beset with problems of soaring costs, limited access, long publication times, and archiving and space limitations. The question of who is responsible for these problems has a number of answers depending upon who is providing the answers. Publishers commonly fault librarians with not advocating for more of university budgets. The fact is, though, that librarians have been spending more each year on scholarly communication, and Bachrach told the librarians in his audience that "you should not get any of the blame." Commercial publishers especially "Elsevier, aka the Evil Empire" are commonly faulted. Commercial publishers are really a post Second World War phenomenon, and of Elsevier, Bachrach says, "Sure they charge too much, but how's the view to a shareholder? In terms of their bottom line, they've been very successful in terms of making money. They are doing what they are supposed to be doing."Society publishers come in for some of the blame. As non-profits, they should be serving their members' interests; yet some behave as if they were for-profit corporations. The American Chemical Society, for example, made $34 million on publications last year. Faculty authors, though, get much of the blame for the problems confronting scholarly publishing, according to Bachrach.
Bachrach suggests that "the core of the whole issues is [faculty authors']insatiable drive to publish." In 1999, some 700,000 articles were published in chemistry; one would have to read 2,000 per day to keep up. The fact that the number of patent applications is up much less strongly than the number of journal articles suggests that academics are the ones behind the publishing boom. Between 1967 and 1999, there was a small rise in the number of chemistry faculty, but while the average chemistry professor published six articles over a two year period in 1967, the average for 1999 was 12 articles over a two year period. While one might expect the increase between 1967 and 1999 to be due to associate professors seeking tenure, full professors were the ones primarily responsible. They need to bring in research money, and they make themselves look better on grant applications by publishing more.
Tied to authors' increasing impetus to publish has been a boom in the number of new journals. While 15 new chemistry journals were founded in the 1970s, 22 were founded in the 1990s. Bachrach notes that "journals are a really effective way of getting things to the reader," but "journals can be stopped if people refuse to publish in or edit for" them. Bachrach notes that with most faculty members, "there is no thought beyond doing what professors did when we were graduate students." Faculty do not question the "standard operating procedure"of doing research funded by grants; writing for journals for free, or even paying page charges; serving as editors and referees for little or no pay;transferring copyright to publishers; and then expecting their institutions to"buy" the publications for which they worked for free.
Bachrach discussed some of the current initiatives addressing the crisis in scholarly publishing. Create Change (http://www.createchange.org)is one such initiative. SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (http://www.arl.org/sparc) is another. SPARC partnered with the American Chemical Society in launching Organic Letters. A subscription to Organic Letters costs $2,300 per year,while Elsevier's Tetrahedron Letters costs $8,859 per year. Bachrach notes that he personally was "very against the Organic Letters launch and still sends stuff to Tetrahedron Letters." He notes that Tetrahedron Letters is a good publication and questions whether scientists as authors are really "in the business of wanting a competitive marketplace . . . I have some serious problems with what SPARC is trying to do. Is it going to do what we as a community want it to do?" He suggests that Organic Letters costs more than it should and that there was no need to create a competing journal,leaving libraries with two journals instead of one to buy.
Bachrach finds more likely solutions to the scholarly publishing crisis in changing the behavior of faculty authors. He suggests that authors and institutions need to re-evaluate the publish or perish philosophy, reject the notion of the least publishable unit, think long and hard before creating new journals, re-think copyright transfer policies, support worthy journals by refusing to referee for, submit to, or purchase others, and use technology effectively.
Adrian Alexander, Executive Director of the Big 12 Plus Libraries Consortium,was the respondent to Bachrach. Alexander noted that the journal crisis centers upon the "byproducts of the scholarly communication system," whose stewardship academics "abandoned, . . . opening the way to commercial publishers." Alexander sees a solution to the crisis in the Tempe Principles (http://www.arl.org/scomm/tempe.html). The Tempe Principles call for:
development, support, and funding of electronic journals that fill gaps in existing scholarly literature or offer dramatically reduced costs compared to commercial journals;
faculty's signing of the "open letter" on the Public Library of Science site(http://www.publiclibraryofscience.org/),pledging to publish with or edit for only journals where authors retain copyrights;
re-evaluating promotion and tenure policies;
developing an array of "scholars' portals"; and
promoting best practices in institutional intellectual property rights policy.
Scholarly Communication: Issues in Publishing
In another plenary session, Stanley Chodorow, Vice President for Academic Affairs for Questia Media and former Associate Vice Chancellor for Academic Planning at University of California, San Diego, also discussed the "Tempe Principles: History and Future." Chodorow also situated the origins of the Tempe Principles amid the recent crisis in scholarly communication with its increases in journal costs, growth in the number of journal titles and pages, and decline of the monograph. "With costs increasing, libraries can buy less of what is produced," and various proposals are being considered which would separate peer review, which is currently paid for in the price of the journal, from the publication process.
The Tempe Principles seek to contain the costs to the academy of published research. While the scholarly community is not co-terminous with the academy,the costs of scholarly communication should be such that universities can pay them. Scholarly publications must be archived in a secure manner, as "scholarly authors want their work to be distributed and accessible for hundreds of years."Despite the problems with peer review, peer review must be preserved. Universities have "offloaded judgment of the quality of scholar's research to the peer review system. If they didn't, deans would have to read this stuff ... Without peer review, universities would make bad or no judgments" about the quality of scholars' work.
The Tempe Principles also, according to Chodorow, seek to protect copyright and fair use in the face of an electronic environment where contracts and licenses are being substituted for fair use. Knowledge must be communicated in a timely manner, especially to scientists who want results within weeks. Emphasis on quality over quantity is also important. The current publication system effectively encourages "publish[ing] one sentence at a time with 78 authors,"and there need to be incentives "to produce better, not more." Finally, full use must be made of new technologies without violation of fundamental principles. NetLibrary, for example, places artificial restrictions on new technologies when it allows only one reader to access an e-book at any time. Fundamentally, there needs to be "restructuring of the economy of scholarly communication to ensure that everyone gets what they need, when they need it."
Chodorow thinks that solutions to the publishing crisis need to go beyond the consortial purchases that are sometimes positioned as the solution. Chodorow describes consortia as playing "a kind of cat and mouse game with the publishers. None of us watching this little game play out think it's going to work in the long run." Technology is also, in itself, not going to be the solution. The solution must lie "in the culture and structure of universities."The problem, though, is that the contemporary university "is a contraption, put together over eight centuries by a tribe of tinkers." The university has its origins in Medieval guilds; universitas literally means "corporation."Early on, the university had a monopoly on the production and communication of knowledge. Knowledge-making escaped from the universities in the sixteenth century with the Renaissance and the invention of printing. Bacon particularly helped to promote the scientific method for knowledge-making by saying that human reason can be profitably applied to the study of the universe and observable phenomena. After Bacon, the scientific community came to reside in gentlemen scholars, not in universities, and it was not until the creation of the German universities in the eighteenth centuries that knowledge-making returned to the universities, where it was progressively professionalized. Once again, though, universities' roles in knowledge-making are being challenged now by claims that knowledge is the foundation of economic growth, which leads to increased partnering with industry. The "contraption that is the university is breaking down" under the pressure of having "a modern corporation strapped to a guild. In the space between them, external power can flow" in the form of "publishers taking advantage of gaps in the structure." Competition between universities for funding and students is also leading to a less elastic market for publications.
Further potential solutions include universities entering the market by producing monographs and journals. Educating faculty, giving them a sense of the economy of their own research programs, would also help, as "the faculty have been infantilized by our system." Working with funding agencies to improve the handling of copyright and changing funding processes to emphasize quality over quantity were also advocated.
John Cox, Principal, John Cox and Associates, the respondent to Chodorow's plenary speech, took a more critical approach to the Tempe Principles. Cox suggests that "the real goal of the Tempe Principles" is to "get commercials out of this game." He questions the wisdom of academe's entering the market by excluding others and of "retreating to the simpler world of the Middle Ages" by concentrating all aspects of knowledge-making in the university. He noted the absence of many players in scholarly publishing from the Tempe group. Only three non-profits and one foreign participant were present at Tempe. The Tempe Principles "acknowledge the rest of the world but is a very American-centered document."
Cox also argues that secure archives are not controversial, but that"archives mean different things to different people." Faculty should be free to use their own work in their own research and teaching, but in its emphasis on fair use, the Tempe Principles are essentially "kicking at an open door," as Elsevier Science has itself taken a lead in allowing this (because it has no economic impact). The Principles' attempt to persuade faculty to publish in particular places will probably be ineffectual, as "faculty are going to publish where they will." There is no real advantage for faculty in the Tempe Principles. "The system that we think is so bad still works for faculty and universities. You're appealing to their (faculty members') better nature, and their infantilism probably means they don't have one." Creating counter journals may not cause a lowering of prices; it may simply create more journals for libraries to buy.
Cox attributes the current problems with scholarly communication to the fact that "we are actually in a dysfunctional market." Part of the problem is that"price signals don't get through to faculty. They are kept from getting them by libraries." Scholarly societies are also far from innocent in the current situation. Blackwell Science does not own a single journal that it publishes;all are published under contract for scholarly societies. Highwire Press titles are 20 times more expensive than Catchword journals, yet Highwire is "touted as a model." Cox suggests that "in a proper market, prices will find their own level. If they are too high, people won't buy." He notes that, with consortia,libraries are for the first time acting as consumers by negotiating prices. Publishing is a business "driven to serve authors' needs to publish." Commercial publishers got into the business because, after the Second World War, society publishers "did nothing to deal with the escalation in publishing volume. Entrepreneurs came in."
Cox suggests that the academic community should be more involved in lobbying about copyright and licensing. Copyright law is really driven by the concerns of those producing software, music, and movies, whose markets are much bigger than those for scholarly publishing: "the entire STM market is smaller than the UK market for chocolate." The academic community is also responsible for the shift from valuing quality over quantity in scholars' publishing. Using SPARC money to buy out the most expensive commercial journals and then doing with these what they will (including lowering subscription costs) would be more effectual than creating competing journals. Progress will not be made until the crisis hits faculty personally.
Sensemaking and Digital Librarians
"Sensemaking and Digital Librarians" a concurrent speech delivered by Mary Lynn Rice-Lively, Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Texas at Austin, explored the new roles of information professionals,expended on the concept of sensemaking as it relates to digital libraries, and discussed innovations and changing work processes in the digital environment.
Among the historical roles librarians have been serving is the "keeper[s] of the book[s]" gatekeeping for physical objects and facilitating all aspects of the "information lifecycle" its creation and selection,organizing and providing of access, distribution and use, and implementation of services. Currently, information professionals analyze and predict the use of information; organize information and create new, value-added information spaces; design and deliver information services; and develop information services based upon knowledge of clients' needs and information use patterns. It is expected that librarians today will combine technical expertise in computing and telecommunications with knowledge of and commitment to meeting people's information needs.
Librarians help to translate the complexities of the information world for information users. They navigate between traditional and digital, global libraries. They design and customize online gateways to user-oriented information. They possess specific knowledge of resources and tools to address information needs. They serve as boundary-spanners between various departments and units of their employing organizations. They interact with people outside their areas of expertise by going out of their organizational place to work with other groups. That is, librarians today are doing all the things they have traditionally done but in a broader environment.
Digital libraries are systematically organized collections of information that may or may not be part of traditional libraries. With digital libraries,librarians provide the technologies that link people to resources, create transparent linkages between digital libraries and other information sources,and promote the goal of universal access. Digital libraries seek the systematic development of means to collect, store, organize, and distribute information in digital form. Digital libraries may not offer more economical and efficient delivery of information, but they do strengthen collaboration and communication and contribute to life-long learning. Examples of digital libraries include the University of Texas at Austin's UT Library Online (http://www.ib.utexas.edu), Margaret Anderson's Digital Librarian site (http://www.digital-library.com),and the Internet Public Library (http://www.ipl.org).
Sensemaking is grounded in theories of communication, information, social cognition, and social constructivism (the notion that groups create meaning around events). Sensemaking is evidenced in individual and group efforts to understand situations, to construct meaning by bridging gaps of understanding between what people experience with their physical senses and their past"images" and understandings their reflections upon their perceptions from similar situations. Essentially, sensemaking comes into operation whenever there is a gap between experience and expectations. According to Rice-Lively, "Sensemaking is a conceptual approach to studying the active and intellectual process that support building clear representations of information stimuli."
Sensemaking is always in operation when people respond to information technologies. As an example of this Rice-Lively recounted her own attempts to deal with her initial experience of three-dimensional remote teleconferencing as supported by Total Presence Technology. Rice-Lively was in one location, with the rest of the audience, who was being spoken to by the Texas governor, who was in another city. She could, however, "see" the image of the governor standing at a podium before her with the curtains of the local site behind him. He seemed a three-dimensional person, only a little smaller than expected and his arms would disappear from view at the local site whenever he moved them beyond the range of the projection equipment at the remote site. There were also occasional moments of delay in the image stream, when the face of the speaker seemed to "melt." In Rice-Lively's case, she was with other people to whom she could turn for help and ideas in processing the sensual stimuli that did not conform to her prior experiences. However, she wonders what will happen as distance-based information technologies prevail. "How will distance education students who are social learners fare? What happens when you remove the social technologies? When they encounter challenges in their work environments, most people turn to their colleagues and work teams in making sense of their experiences."
There are other challenges for people in emerging information technologies. The trend toward miniaturization will eventually be countered by the capacity of human hands and eyes. A problem for librarians is that people do not go to the developers of the technology for help, they go to librarians for help. Most people seek information socially, yet "we spend a lot of time developing[computerized] help systems." New interfaces pose problems.
Accessibility of Electronic Information
In her workshop presentation "We've Made It Available But Is It Accessible?Information Concerns in the Electronic Age," Cheryl Riley, Associate Professor,Central Missouri State University, discussed problems that electronic information resources present to persons with disabilities and ways in which information can be made accessible. Riley notes that there are three reasons to work toward accessibility because it is the right thing to do, because law mandates it, and because it makes economic sense to serve the growing population of individuals with disabilities. Between 35 and 49 million Americans over the age of 15 have disabilities and the highest percentage of these are over the age of 65.
Studies of the accessibility of institutional home pages reveal that a very low percentage of these are accessible. One study found that only 22 per cent of institutional home pages are accessible. Moving into the site beyond the home page, at one level from the home page, only 3 per cent of pages are accessible,and at two levels beyond, only 1 per cent is accessible. Other studies of different pages found between 27 per cent and 43 per cent accessibility. Riley notes that these low percentages "show an egregious disregard for the disabled population." It is also very risky, as "it only takes one student to make one complaint" to get the entire institution into trouble under disability laws.
Riley addressed some common myths about making electronic information accessible. The first myth is that accessible Web pages are dull. They can be interesting and accessible if one uses ALT-tags to provide descriptions of all images. Another myth is that authoring accessible Web pages is expensive and time-consuming. Failure to design accessible pages becomes very expensive when institutions face suits over inaccessible pages. That accessibility is too difficult for the average Web designer is another myth. Persons with visual disabilities actually make up a small percentage of disabled users of electronic information. Others may, for example, have mobility difficulties that preclude the use of a mouse to navigate through pages. Good assistive technology does not solve all accessibility problems, contrary to another myth. Accessibility does not only help people with disabilities, another common myth; it helps everyone.
Riley provided some guidelines for working toward accessibility. Textual alternatives should be provided for any auditory or visual content on pages. Color alone should not be relied upon to provide information, as many Web users have color deficits or monochrome browsers. HTML mark-up and style sheets used properly will prevent many problems, as will clarity in use of natural language. Screen readers can go from English to Spanish if language changes are coded for such that the readers "know" the change is happening. Using tables only for truly tabular information, not for page layout; ensuring that pages with new technologies (like dynamic content) transform gracefully; and allowing for users' control of time-sensitive content changes are all recommended. Also recommended are: designing for device independence; using W3C guidelines and recommendations (http://www.w3.org/); providing context and orientation information; providing clear navigation mechanisms; and creating clear, simple documents. Pilot testing of pages on their intended audiences including disabled student groups will reveal many problems that automated validation methods cannot detect.
Final proceedings of this conference will be published later in the year. Next year's 17th Annual NASIG conference will be held June 20-23, 2002 at the College of William and Mary, in Williamsburg, Virginia with the theme,"Transforming Serials: The Revolution Continues." The Call for Papers can be found at: http://www.nasig.org/public/NASIG2002.html
Kate Manuel (kmanuel@lib.nmsu.edu) is Instruction Coordinator at New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, New Mexico, USA.
