April 17, 2008
Librarians React to Lawsuit Against Georgia State U.
News broke yesterday that three scholarly publishers—Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, and SAGE Publications—have filed a lawsuit in federal court in Atlanta against Georgia State University. Focusing on “unauthorized digital distribution” of copyrighted material—in electronic course-reading packs, for instance—the plaintiffs call the practice “pervasive, flagrant, and ongoing” at GSU, and seek an injunction to stop it.
In their public comments, the plaintiffs have been careful not to antagonize librarians, pointing out that they have close working relationships with many libraries, and that other institutions—Hofstra, Cornell, Syracuse, and Marquette, for instance—have negotiated agreements that satisfy publishers’ concerns. But it’s not lost on librarians that Charlene Hurt, the university’s dean of libraries, is one of four Georgia State officials named in the suit.
Library Journal posted a long article about the suit yesterday. And blogging librarians have begun to weigh in on what the legal action might mean for them. Dorothea at Caveat Lector says she’d “hate to be Georgia State” right now. Barbara Fister at ACRLog calls the news “alarming” and says “it appears to have widespread implications.”
Kevin Smith, blogging at Scholarly Communications @ Duke, dissects the publishers’ legal strategy. Then he throws down the gauntlet:
The complaint against Georgia State acknowledges fair use, as it must, but it relegates it to a tiny fraction of situations, none of which can realistically be expected to occur on a modern college campus. In effect, this is an attempt to enforce judicially a “pay-per-use” model of content distribution. The real irony is that it is justified as an attempt to remedy a “free-rider” problem — the claim that universities are appropriating the work of publishers and authors without just compensation. This claim is patently absurd, given the amount of money university libraries invest in published resources, but it is downright offensive when the real issue is clarified. Publishers here are themselves the free-riders, obtaining a huge amount of academic content from the universities and their faculty without compensation.
Those are fighting words, and it will be interesting to see how widely they’re shared by the library community—and how publishers address them.
Jennifer Howard | Posted on Thursday April 17, 2008 | PermalinkComments
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For Kevin Smith’s benefit, the “free rider” argument is not “patently absurd.” Here is how I put it on a posting for InsideHigherEd earlier today:
“The basic issue here, for university presses, is fairness—not just ‘fair use’ in a legal sense, but fairness in the allocation of the burden of supporting scholarly publication. Why should the faculty and students at Georgia State get a ‘free ride”‘on the labor and investment of those some 80 American universities that support university presses? Because they are not paying anything for the privilege of using the materials that presses produce, they are not doing anything to support the whole system of scholarly communication on which those very students and faculty depend. Many GSU faculty rely on publications with university presses to gain tenure and promotion. By paying nothing for use of our publications, they are essentially asking other universities to help them gain tenure and promotion while contributing nothing to the cost of running the system. I should think the universities that pay the costs for the system would object to having Georgia State take advantage of it without helping support it.”
Of course, GSU buys some of our books and subscribes to some of our journals. But does it feel that by so purchasing them they are free to reprint them at will? This makes them nothing more than a “parasitical” publisher, no better than the foreign pirates that reprint huge quantities of U.S. intellectual property, thereby robbing the U.S. economy of billions of dollars that would help the balance of trade.
— Sandy Thatcher Apr 17, 04:05 PM #
But Sandy, how much money do scholarly journals pay their authors? Usually nothing. The intellectual content of your journals is basically subsidized by tuition and, in the case of state-supported institutions, taxpayers, who financially suport the scholars so that you don’t have to pay them for their content. Furthermore, the authors of your articles use libraries’ collections, either printed items that libraries have bought or electronic versions that we’ve licensed, so the libraries are also directly paying to provide your authors with much of the research material that goes into the publications that you now think we should pay over-and-over again to provide access to. The “burden” of supporting scholarly publication is not, primarily, on the journal publisher but on the providers (usually libraries) of materials which make scholarly investigation possible in the first place. On top of this, all three of these publishers now publish more and more low-quality materials, especially under the guise of reference guides and “companions,” that are way overpriced in relation to their scholarly originality and value and have diluted the prestige of their imprints.
— Rob Apr 17, 04:20 PM #
I think we should be clear that this is just one more example of the dying publishing model desperately trying to hold on. Like the RIAA, scholarly publishers don’t seem to understand, or don’t want to see, what is happening to their world. The truth is that over the next decade we will see many attempts to preserve models of scholarly communication based on subscriptions and the sale on monographs with restricted rights. While this is happening open means of distributing scholarship will grow and will eventually dominate. In that time scholars will come to see that locking their work up behind what will become increasingly high walls that restrict access to a smaller and smaller number of people is not the way to communicate their or to develop a reputation. None of this denies the value of peer review or the contributions of scholarly editors, but the current print-based economic model of distributing scholarship is broken and everyone knows it. In the end universities and colleges will subsidize this process, not as they do now by providing money to their libraries to purchase materials, but rather through various means of supporting open scholarship for their faculty. To the extent that university presses embrace and help develop new models for open scholarship, they will be contribute to this future. To the extent that they fight to preserve models of proprietary scholarship, they will inevitably end up losing and will be nothing but a drain on their campuses.
— David Apr 18, 07:09 AM #
The digital world completely changes the economics and the practical consequences of academic publishing. I address these issues in an article: “Marketing Ideas: Reshaping Academic Publishing in a Digital World.” (www.scienceprogress.og/2008/04/marketing-ideas/
Briefly: First, if there is profit to be had, academic authors should have a fair share of it. An academic publishing contract which stipulates that an author collects no share of the sales in each form (e.g., print or digital) until at least 300 copies of that form are sold annually does not give the author a fair share of the profit. There is no extra cost to the publisher annually; once produced, the sale of a digital product is almost entirely profit; similarly for print copies if print on demand is well-established.
Second, for purposes of dissemination, authors may be poorly served by a standard restrictive publishing agreement which grants publication and distribution rights exclusively to the publisher. If a publisher decides to not distribute or “print” the work, the author may have little or no avenue for having her or his work distributed.
Universities, too, have an interest in how this new world is structured. As things stand now, universities already pay the salaries of academic authors, and hefty subscriptions to journals and research databases. Thus, when a university has to pay copyright fees it could, ironically, and unlike corporate clients, end up paying twice or even thrice for the use of material. For example, if the school puts a digital copy of one of its print journals on E-reserve, or if a faculty member posts a digital copy of an article from one of the university’s print or electronic journals on a course management website the university may have to pay a copyright fee – yet the university already owns that material, paid for it, and may even have paid to produce it, as one of its own employees, or an employee of another university, which is in the same boat, may have created it in the first place.
Academic authors need to be part of the effort to rehsape the publishing world, since they are the ones who sign the publishing agreements in the first place. At the same time, universities are the primary customers of academic material and therefore would have considerable leverage if they were to exercise it in a coordinated fashion.
— KA Wallace Apr 20, 11:40 AM #
Rob apparently is unaware that some authors of journal articles make lots of money, in the thousands of dollars, from reproduction of their articles in coursepacks and anthologies. It is a myth that journal authors make no money from their publications. Sure, there are many forms of subsidy at work in scholarly publishing, including the ones that Rob notes. My point, though, was that GSU is taking advantage of subsidies provided by OTHER universities and making no return on THEIR investment. Is that fair?
David, who is obviously an advocate of open access, may not realize just how difficult it is to come up with alternative business models, especially for monograph publishing. Penn State Press, as it happens, is experimenting with one such OA model right now, with our Romance Studies series: http://www.romancestudies.psu.edu. His assumption that universities will generally just be glad to subsidize all costs of publishing up front is way off base and wildly out of touch with reality. When did he last talk with an administrator who is responsible for overseeing a university press? I have yet to meet one who feels that this is going to happen easily, if at all.
KA Wallace seems unaware that there is no “profit” being made in university press publishing. We operate to break even, if we can, with the help of a small university subsidy. We do pay royalties to authors of some monographs, but not all. The main decision on royalties turns on their effect on pricing and certain pricing thresholds that affect the marketability of books. Universities that subscribe to journals through aggregators like Project Muse do NOT have to pay twice; instructors can simply provide the URLs to their students for the articles they want them to read. We welcome the input of authors into reshaping the world of scholarly publishing; they are often the last ones to be heard from in these debates, alas. All too often, they listen to librarians and others who have their own economic stakes in the system and want to change it to favor their positions, and they seldom take the time to do the research into what would be best for the system overall, including their interests. They take their cues from others because, in the end, they really want to spend their time on doing their own research and teaching. And who can blame them?
— Sandy Thatcher Apr 22, 05:55 PM #