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Brainstorm: Lives of the Mind Stan Katz

Harvard Scholarship on the Web

In this morning’s New York Times, Patricia Cohen reports that that Harvard faculty will be voting later today on a proposal (the exact nature of which is not clear in the Cohen piece) to “permit Harvard [faculty?] to distribute their scholarship online, instead of signing exclusive agreements with scholarly journals that often have tiny readerships and high subscription costs.” Bob Darnton, the new University Librarian, is quoted as commenting that “It will be a first step toward freeing scholarship from the stranglehold of commercial publishers by making it freely available on our own university repository.”

It is hard to tell exactly what is going on here, but let me try to guess (and I will return to this subject in the future). Darnton seems to be referring to the problem of STM (science, technology and medicine) journals published by large commercial publishers (Elsevier, John Wiley, and their ilk). The prices for STM publications from such sources have risen astronomically over the past decade (and more), and this has clearly constituted a huge burden for university libraries. There have been a number of open access responses to the STM journal problem, and it is possible that Harvard’s proposal is one of the many university-based responses. The typical response is to post articles on public or at least free Web sites, thereby avoiding the licensing fees charged by commercial publishers. Fine.

But I do not want to deal with the STM problem. The question that interests me is the availability of humanities and social science journal articles on the Web. Very few of these are published by commercial publishers. Most of them are published by nonprofit university presses, though some are published directly by learned societies. The interesting point is that almost all of the nonprofit publishers also protect their material by copyright, and charge licensing fees to access them. Compared to commercial publishers, the fees are low. For university faculty such fees are invisible, since their libraries pay the fees, and so long as faculty use university IP addresses to access the material, it is “free” to the user. Since academic presses are almost always required to break even on their operating costs, and since the average journal does not produce significant surpluses, the license fees provide crucial revenue for the publishers.

The point I want to make about the Harvard proposal is that it can be seen as a move to undercut nonprofit publishers as well as the commercial behemoths (if it is truly a proposal to post all Harvard faculty articles on the university Web site). Depending on the details, it might also be a proposal to bypass peer review, unless Harvard plans to set up its own peer-review process. What social science and humanities faculty have to debate is the merits of entering the world of preprint article circulation that has served the scientists so well. Our scholarship is, I think, significantly different that that of the scientists. Both copyright and publisher peer-review have a long and useful past in our world, and we would do well to think through the implications of abandoning them — though it is hard to imagine that this is what Harvard actually has in mind.

Posted at 08:38:21 AM on February 12, 2008 | All postings by Stan Katz

Comments

  1. Allow me to raise a couple of objections to Mr. Katz’ comments.

    1. Very large commercial publishers are also involved in SSH publishing (for example Blackwell’s, recently purchased by Wiley, and Sage. Also, prices of SSH journals are beginning to escalate;

    2. In many countries outside the US and UK, commercial publishers are involved in SSH publishing. The cases of France and Italy are typical in this regard;

    3. SSH literature is of use to many people beyond the university crowd. Secondary teaching and community college teaching would be enhanced, as would NGO’s, civil servants and a wide variety of citizens who want to understand present political, social, cultural and economic issues. For this reason, OA’s benefits reach well beyond academe and should not be constrained to academe, especially when the research has been funded by public money;

    4. In many countries, SSH publications are subsidized by governments (e.g. Canada);

    5. There is no reason why societies should use their publication to finance other activities, especially if this means restricting access (by an economic barrier) to the research results of the authors.

    — Jean-Claude Guédon · Feb 12, 10:02 AM · #

  2. What is this “publisher peer-review” that Katz claims has a “long and useful past” in SSH publishing? In my experience, peer review is always overseen by journal editors who are academics —not employees of the publishing house—and the review is done by other academic specialists. As far as I can tell from my own experience, peer review for online journals works no differently than peer review for ink and paper journals. We don’t need for-profit publishing houses for peer-review, and we certainly don’t need them for copyright purposes. An online publisher has never sold my work to commercial journals without informing me or compensating me— a problem I’ve had with journals published by for-profit publishing houses. I have no idea what Harvard is up to, but Katz freely admits that he doesn’t either. Does the Chronicle peer review its submissions? My review of Katz’s manuscript would conclude: “your data is incomplete and your argument is built on conjecture. You need to finish your research before publishing your conclusions.”

    — DrJohn · Feb 12, 01:15 PM · #

  3. Stan: first there is no reason that humanities publishers couldn’t convert to open access and still turn a profit, perhaps even more so that they do now. There are lots of resources available for publishers who want to convert to open access and employ new business models.

    Also, this locking away of content in subscription only databases is part of the problem, and no way to monetize your content. The issue is that “search,” e.g., Google, has become the de facto method for finding information. Period. Thus, scholars will increasingly find that as they allow publishers to lock their content away in subscription only databases, they will become less and less relevant as people refuse to navigate the thousands of private databases out there to find relevant content. Technology is disintermediating the humanities and social sciences, like it or not.

    So, we can have a short lament for the social science and humanities publishers, perhaps, but I think the brain power of the academy is better spent trying to find ways to harness technology to suit it’s ends, rather than throwing our shoes into the machines in a vein attempt to slow technology’s march.

    — Chris Blanchard · Feb 12, 06:00 PM · #

  4. Chris Blanchard needs to tell us in university press journal publishing where “lots of resources” are available for publishing our humanities journals open access. They don’t exist, at least not yet.

    He should also read the AAUP statement on open access to gain a better understanding of the complexities of this issue for university presses: http://www.aaupnet.org/aboutup/issues/oa/index.html

    The content of any journals in Project Muse (400+ journals in humanities and social sciences) is not locked away from Google searching. Muse has made its content fully Google searchable. Students and faculty on campuses that subscribe to Muse can gain immediate full-text access once they do a Google search and reach a Muse article; others are given an abstract and asked to contact Muse for full-contact access.

    Harvard junior faculty may suffer most from this policy if Harvard does post their articles before acceptance by journals because some journal editors will wonder why they should bother spending their time on articles that are already freely available on the web; and without those publications in peer-reviewed journals, these faculty will have a hard time getting tenure. Of course, very few get tenure at Harvard anyway, but they should worry about getting tenure elsewhere.

    — Sandy Thatcher, Director, Penn State Press, and President, AAUP · Feb 13, 06:51 AM · #

  5. Stan: Thank you. As one of the four editors of a humanities journal that charges subscribers a modest amount and uses a large amount of highly skilled free labor to evaluate and improve submissions, I too find some reason to worry in the Harvard plan. The best description of it I have found so far is Bob Darnton’s, published as an op-ed by the Crimson and available on their site. Apparently Harvard faculty will post their articles on a library site and give Harvard, if they agree (they can opt out) non-exclusive world rights to distribute them. They would also be able to submit the same pieces to journals. But would my colleagues and I be willing to evaluate, work on and print (and make available via Project Muse) a piece that is already accessible world wide in less finished form? And how will we deal with the bibliographical puzzles that will ensue?What happens if texts or images to which rights exist are used in the articles?

    None of this is beyond solution, of course. But I have to agree with Stan and Sandy: it’s not the humanities journals that have been holding up the libraries for vast sums or concealing their content from the world, and I am not sure what this proposal will do to improve the situation of our readers or our Harvard authors.

    — tony grafton · Feb 13, 07:29 AM · #

  6. The Harvard vote seems a bit silly, because any academic can already put their research out on the internet where anyone can access it. And the Harvard resolution would apparently not require Harvard faculty to put their articles in a free depository—anyone could opt out. So, how does it change the status quo? Morally?

    Academics can decide where to publish their research. They could shun high-priced journals. They could flock to low-priced journals that have tolerant policies about access. Why haven’t the collective acts of individual academics solved the problem already? There’s a wide variety of journals with a wide variety of prices and publication policies. Academics need to make their choices count.

    — Dean · Feb 13, 07:41 AM · #

  7. I stopped subscriptions to my ten favorite journals about a decade ago, and about five years ago requested that our library stop subscribing to them too. I depend on prepublication views of drafts from friends now. This is not optimal but I cannot justify wasting money on closed journals accessible to no one, in financial reality. I cannot waste money that way and my school’s budgets cannot let our library waste money that goes to some giant publishing/media conglomerate’s bottom line, while restriciting access to insure that the research gets read by no one at all. Last year I sent 12,000 copies of a wierd journal article to 12,000 stranger professors in 41 nations on the web, for free, sending 200 copies a night for 60 consecutive days. The results were approxmiately 100 times what any peer reviewed publishing of mine in the past had produced. 12,000 strangers, sent the article based on keyword overlaps in their web available abstracts and my own article abstracts, produced 1 book contract, 2 chapter contracts, 11 speaking invitations in China, 13 speaking invitations in other nations, one keynote speech invitation for a decent conference, 7 keynote speech invitations for junk conferences, etc. etc.—approximately 100 times the response to any print published journal article of my past.

    This is a new world—it is good to see Harvard and others entering it. Soon the whole world will be able to do literature reviews from anywhere without enriching a media conglomerate that locks away content so no one reads it.

    This is wonderful news.

    — Richard Tabor Greene · Feb 13, 07:49 AM · #

  8. I agree that humanities journals are largely inexpensive, and haven’t caused the “serials crisis” in libraries (which, because of the budget shifting, is really a books crisis, too). That said, it’s nearly impossible to get undergraduates to use print journals. I suspect, too, that younger scholars are growing less and less likely to drop everything and run to the library to read an article.

    Online subscriptions help a bit, but so far as I know, you can’t link to a library subscription found through Google except by IP address, which means you have to be on campus.

    And, while I’m generally a peaceable person, finding an article through Google that you can’t actually read induces something that is a a close cousin to road rage.

    — Barbara Fister · Feb 13, 10:18 AM · #

  9. For those who may not be aware SSRN (Social Science Research Network, http://ssrn.com) distributes pre-press scholarly working papers and published papers through its on-line electronic library. SSRN’s collection includes over 140,000 full text scholarly papers and covers the social sciences, law, business and humanities.

    Any paper uploaded to SSRN by an author (at no charge) is available for download at no charge forever, or until the author decides to take it down. SSRN takes no copyright on papers uploaded to its systems, only a non-exclusive license to distribute the paper. Authors can revise their papers on SSRN at any time (again, with no charge).

    The entire SSRN collection is indexed by Google and the other major search engines. Most publishers allow the posting of pre-print working papers on SSRN, and some are now allowing authors to post published papers on SSRN (with no charge).

    SSRN was founded by scholars, for scholars. SSRN is a resource that can be used by all researchers and universities. SSRN is a for profit corporation, does not take grants, and covers it costs by providing specialized services to universities and other organizations on a fee basis. Some publishers distribute their scholarly journal articles through SSRN at a fee for download and SSRN receives a fee from them for this service.

    Total downloads from SSRN’s collection runs at over 400,000 full text papers per month with over 18 million downloads from inception.

    — Michael C. Jensen · Feb 15, 10:28 AM · #

  10. SSRN is great, and there is a new HRN for humanities – terrific examples of scholarly work available to all.

    I should clarify my earlier point (#8) – libraries do enable remote access to subscriptions, but in the case of articles that appear in Google Scholar, links only work for a campus IP address, so for those you’d have to go to your library’s website to discover if a work is available or not.

    I think the notion that library subscriptions should subsidize the work of scholars as of old, when libraries and scholars work for the same ends and other means of distributing research are available, is problematic. There are creative ways to retain quality without making our institutions pay for it twice – in salaries and research support, and buying it back through the library.

    — barbara fister · Feb 15, 05:00 PM · #

  11. thanks

    — peter tomiluyi · Feb 18, 12:17 PM · #

  12. Ineed to school in the harvard and i will be there with my scholarship.
    Help me please,God bless you

    — emo · Feb 18, 06:47 PM · #

  13. Dear Sirs,
    I have got my B.S in Animal-Agriculture major from Guilan State University-Iran. I am interested in following my study in order to get M.S or even PHD in your university. As I researched through your website there are various majors which I am interested in, main included Genetics and Molecular engineering.

    If you need more information I can send curriculum vitae accompanied with all courses which I’ve passed.
    Thank you in advance and I hope to hear from you soon.

    Sincerely, Sophia Hamidi Tehran-IRAN

    — MARZIEH HAMIDI · Feb 19, 03:36 AM · #

  14. Dear Sir

    Recently I came across your web-page through the internet and I have interested to apply for the Master programme in Political science. To introduce my self my name is Gudeta Kebede graduated from Addis Ababa University in August 10, 2006 in the field of Political Science and International Relations (Distinction (3.36)) with B.A degree.
    Currently, I am working in Jimma University in Ethiopia at the Department of Civics and Ethics with the academic status of graduate Assistant-II.
    Thus, would you mind send me the application form and the relevant information to apply the scholarship for the above mentioned programme.
    With regards
    Gudeta Kebede

    — Gudeta Kebede · Feb 20, 11:03 AM · #

  15. i am going to complete my graduation in computer science & engineering,
    now i need a schlorship for my higher study
    can u help me by giving any advice or or other way about my higher study
    shariful
    bangladesh

    — Md. Shariful Alam · Mar 5, 06:26 AM · #

  16. hey,am a kenyan and i would very much wish to join your school but i am from a very poor background so am kindly asking you to grant me with a scholarship to your school.i finished school last year 2007.thank you and please reply

    — sylvia wandia mutua · Mar 6, 03:19 AM · #

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