The Importance of Being Earnest: Charleston Conference Proceedings, 2014

Preface and Acknowledgments

The Importance of Being Earnest was the theme of the 2014 Charleston Conference which took place in Charleston, South Carolina, on Wednesday, November 5 through Saturday, November 8, 2014, with over 1,600 participants. The far-ranging and diverse program, which focuses on the purchase and leasing of information of all types and in all available formats, is curated by an able team of Charleston Conference directors headed by Beth Bernhardt and Leah Hinds who have worked long and hard to compile this volume. Thanks are due to Leah and Beth and to all the Charleston Conference Directors who helped in assuring timely and professionally peer-reviewed submissions. Thanks are also due to the Purdue University Press team: Katherine Purple, Managing Editor, Dave Scherer, Scholarly Repository Specialist, Bryan Schaffer, Sales and Marketing Specialist, Dianna Gilroy, Production Editor, and many others behind the scenes.

In 2014, the Charleston Conference included eleven preconferences covering the evaluation of electronic resources, using Excel, content analysis, online learning, the library as publisher, building eBook collections for the long term, campus open access policies, online learning and the library, negotiating with vendors, advanced data analysis, and sustainable strategies for digital resource delivery and access. Ten plenary sessions; several hundred concurrent sessions; and lively lunch discussions, PechaKucha-like shotgun shorts, and poster sessions spiced up the offerings. In 2013, the Neapolitan format was introduced which allowed three plenary-level speakers to speak in large rooms during the same time slot. This innovation by the Conference Directors was very popular and was continued in 2014. The Conference Directors also continued Charleston Premiers during Saturday morning breakfast which were refereed and allowed companies to make 5-minute presentations about new and emerging products.

The Charleston Conference has a plethora of additional offerings including Juried Product Development Forums for publishers or vendors who want to get feedback from librarians about new or emerging products, Dine Around dinners on Friday night at some of Charleston’s well-known restaurants, a Gala Reception on Thursday evening, and a Leadership Award for one of the Conference Directors.

The 2014 lead keynote speech by Anthea Stratigos of Outsell, entitled Being Earnest is the New Normal, energized us all to consider new approaches in our everyday environments. Other keynote and Neapolitan speakers included Charles Lyons, Bob Nardini, and Nicole Allen discussing the library’s changing role in providing textbook content; Todd Carpenter, Bruce Heterich and Brian Sherman and Scott Bernier were interested in discovery and fair linking; Adam Chesler, Jim Dooley, David Parker and Zac Rolnick tackled DRM and intellectual property rights; and John Rennie was interested in developments in science education; Scott Plutchak, Greg Tananbaum, and John Vaughn dissected the scholarly ecosystem; James L.W. West presented a fascinating historical view of price control and the publisher; and Carol Tenopir and Gabriel Hughes concentrated on download data.

There were breaks in the plenary and Neapolitan talks when a lively Oxford-style debate ensued between Rick Anderson and David Magier about whether library collections should be shaped by patrons or librarians. As well, a panel of James J. O’Donnell, Phil Richerme, and Christine Fair were brutally frank about what Faculty want librarians to know.

The Saturday sessions were equally stimulating. Beginning with Premier five-minute refereed presentations by new companies and products, the next plenary/Neapolitan talks were about crowd-sourcing of library services (Ilana Barnes Stonebraker, John Dove, Scott Johnson, and Tim Johnson); unavailable material on interlibrary loan (Jennifer Duncan and Carol Kochan), and Big Data, Retention, and Academic Libraries by Adam Murray.

The Concurrent sessions, Lively Lunches, Poster sessions, shotgun sessions, and the like that were submitted and refereed by the editors are grouped into six categories in this volume: Collection Development, End Users, Management and Administration, Patron-Driven Acquisitions and Interlibrary Loan, Scholarly Communication, and Techie Issues.

In 2014, the Charleston Conference introduced several Charleston Seminars which were held prior to the main conference and preconferences. A Digital Curation Seminar was sponsored by the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science and the Charleston Conference for a full day on Monday, November 3 and a half day Tuesday, November 4 just prior to the main Charleston Conference. The luncheon/seminar on Saturday, November 8, 2014, was also held on the theme "Being Earnest With our Collections: Determining Key Challenges and Best Practices. The luncheon was moderated by Michael Arthur and included Michael Levine-Clark and Rebecca Seger, Jill Grogg and Robert McDonald, Jonathan Harwell and Jim Bunnelle as well as Rick Anderson discussing alternative serial distribution models, transitioning from legacy systems to cloud infrastructure, and future possibilities for ebooks. Information and slides from these presentations is located on the Conference website.

Many new ideas and innovations are implemented and shared at the Charleston Conferences!

Reports of many of the plenary sessions and concurrent sessions are included in this volume, many transcribed ably by Caroline Goldsmith. Archives of many of the papers are also loaded online at the Conference website.

And, of course, the city of Charleston was as beautiful and vibrant as ever!

The next Charleston Conference will be held November 4–7, 2015, with the theme Where Do We Go From Here? There will be several new offerings, several preconferences, and Charleston Seminars as librarians, publishers, vendors, aggregators and consultants from all over the world explore important changes within the industry that impact the way in which information is leased, acquired and made available. Charleston Conference information will be updated regularly. For archives and further information, http://www.charlestonlibraryconference.com/

See you in Charleston in November!

Katina Strauch, Founder and Convener, Charleston Conference

Bruce Strauch, Owner, Charleston Conference

Introduction

The Charleston Conference continues to be a major event for information exchange among librarians, vendors and publishers. Now in its thirty-fourth year, the conference continues to be one of the most popular library-related conferences in the United States, if not globally. With record numbers for 2014, conference attendees continue to remark on the informative and thought-provoking sessions. The conference provides a casual, collegial atmosphere where librarians, publishers, and vendors talk freely and directly about issues facing their libraries and information providers. All of this interaction occurs in the beautiful city of Charleston, South Carolina. This is the tenth year that Beth R. Bernhardt has put together the proceedings from the conference and the sixth year for Leah Hinds. We are pleased to share some of the learning experiences that we, and other attendees, had at the conference.

The theme of the 2014 Charleston Conference was Too Much Is Not Enough! While not all presenters prepared written versions of their remarks, enough did so that we are able to include an overview of such subjects as collection development, management, end users, scholarly communication, and technology issues. The unique nature of the Charleston Conference gives librarians, publishers, and library vendors the opportunity to holistically examine these and other points of interest.

Katina Strauch, founder of the conference, continues to be an inspiration to us. Her enthusiasm for the conference and the proceedings is motivating. We hope you, the reader, find the papers as informative as we do and that they encourage the continuation of the ongoing dialogue among librarians, vendors, and publishers that can only enhance the learning and research experience for the ultimate user.

Signed,

Co-Editors of the 34th Charleston Conference Proceedings

Beth R. Bernhardt, Assistant Dean for Collection Management and Scholarly Communications, University of North Carolina at Greensboro and Main Conference Director

Leah Hinds, Assistant Conference Director

Plenary Sessions

What’s the Big Idea? Mellon, ARL, AAU, University Presses, and the Future of Scholarly Communication

Leila Salisbury, Director, University Press of Mississippi

Raym Crow, Senior Consultant, SPARC

Helen Cullyer, Program Officer, The Andrew W Mellon Foundation

Barbara Kline Pope, Executive Director for Communications and the National Academies Press, The National Academies

Charles Watkinson, Director, University of Michigan Press, and Associate University Librarian for Publishing, University of Michigan Library

Copyright of this contribution remains in the name of the author(s). http://dx.doi.org/10.5703/1288284315623

The following is a lightly edited transcript of a live presentation at the 2014 Charleston Conference. Slides and videos are available at http://2014charlestonconference.sched.org/

Leila Salisbury: Good afternoon. I’m happy to hear it’s still lively. This is very nice. It’s really good that you’re all here to hear a quirky piece I feel will solve our issues in scholarly communications over the next hour, so congratulations for coming here. You’ll find this very edifying.

In 2014, both the Mellon Foundation and AAUARL taskforce on scholarly communication have encouraged publishers and universities to develop programs for digital projects that would increase access to and reduce the cost of scholarly communications. These funders in scholarly societies are imagining what the future landscape of scholarship might look like and how digital scholarship might be presented and made accessible both within as well as outside the academy. Concerns over issues of cost, access, the free rider problem, and ongoing sustainability for scholarly monographs and their sponsoring publishers, often university presses, are not new issues, but the current work at Mellon and with this AAU-ARL taskforce has the potential to change the conversation and develop some viable solutions and new thinking in the research publication value chain. Critical to such projects will be the involvement of university presses for the processes of selection, development, vending, and publication of monographs. Also key will be libraries who may act as partners in developing new hosting capabilities and channels of dissemination.

Today, we’ve gathered individuals from both the funding and the publishing side to discuss recent initiatives and to explore how such ecosystem partnerships might function in the years to come. I’ll introduce the speakers briefly here. The full biographies are available online. And then I’ll begin with a series of questions for our group. It’s going to be very much a roundtable discussion. This is going to be hopefully a very lively exchange, and we won’t be doing formal presentations, so we really encourage a lot of interaction with the audience as well.

I’ll do brief introductions from your right to left. We have Helen Cullyer, who’s a program officer in the scholarly communications program at the Andrew Mellon Foundation. She works with the senior program officer, Don Waters, on developing new grant-making initiatives and reviewing grant proposals in the area of scholarly publication, preservation, access, and library services as well as in the evaluation and assessment of grant-funding projects. Sitting next to Helen is Barbara Kline Pope, executive director of communications for the National Academies Press at The National Academies and the current president of the Association of American University Presses. In addition to book publishing, she manages marketing communication programs designed to bring science and engineering to public audiences. Next to her we have Raym Crow. He’s a senior consultant with the SPARC Consulting Group and principal of Chain Bridge Group, a consulting firm providing publishing and sustainability planning. Crow specializes in developing plans for collaborative publishing projects and supply-side business models capable of supporting open-access dissemination. And on the end here, we have Charles Watkinson, an associate university librarian for publishing at the University of Michigan Libraries and Director of University of Michigan Press. Prior to moving to Michigan in 2014 just a couple months ago, Charles was director of Purdue University Press and head of Scholarly Publishing Services in the Purdue Libraries for five years. He’s been a board member of the AAUP and the SSP and was an initiator of the Library Publishing Coalition.

We don’t a have a particular order. People are just going to jump in as they have things they want to share about these particular questions. So I’ll start off. From a personal perspective of your organization, what needs are not being met for participants in the scholarly ecosystem? What is one thing you think should be done to get those needs met? Charles? You want to start?

Charles Watkinson: From the perspective of arriving in Michigan, something that really strikes me, as Director of the Press as well as a librarian, is the number of scholars who are now coming to us with digital scholarship. And it’s not the people who are self-identifying as digital humanists. It’s just everybody. And they often talk about it in terms of the inner companion website or some such thing, but they all have products of digital scholarship. So I think this is a major challenge, and what to do about it. One thing that we’re very interested in here we are University of Michigan Press, as a humanities and qualitative social science publisher, we’re very interested in leveraging the data repository infrastructure being built by libraries as potentially a monograph platform, certainly a platform for companion and supplementary data because that is a very blurry line between what a monograph is and what a humanities data presentation is.

Raym Crow: What I can speak to is I’m involved in a project that is a result of a taskforce on scholarly communications. And what came out of that project was a whitepaper talking about the scholarly monograph marketplace and what the AAU-ARL taskforce is supposed to do is how do we take this intermediate constructively to encourage the economic viability of humanities publishing while leveraging the maneuverability of digital communications and digital technologies and networking. Out of that, the discussion around the whitepaper, I did a prospectus and a proposal for an institutional based title subsidy. And just to give a quick outline of that proposal for those of you that haven’t read the prospectus, the idea was that institutions with sufficient for the faculty’s first books, the effect that’s mentioned where you have to be accepted by a qualifying publisher, initially by university presses, who accept based on their current course standards, part of that payment probably will be made available on open access, but the press and the publishers would be able to sell value-added versions of print-on-demand. So that was the, again, we focused on first books. It would be expanded to target that, and we can talk about that in a little detail.

Leila Salisbury: I like the line at their own risk.

Barbara Kline Pope: So I was introduced as both a publishing director and also president of AAUP, and mostly I’m here today to represent many diverse publishers who are university presses and the associate members of the AAUP, so I just want to make sure you know that. Also want to give you a baseline that all of those 130-some members have very diverse opinions, very diverse data on the plans for pay-to-publish model and other areas. But what I think all of us in university press publishing or scholarly publishing have in common is that we have a dual mission, and that mission is to advance scholarship through connecting readers to authors and authors to readers, but we also have a financial responsibility to our institutions. So I just want to sort of give you a baseline there.

So when I started to think about this first question, I went looking for data. Rather than say what we as an organization or we as a set of publishers can offer scholars, what do scholars want and what do scholars need, mostly? So I went to the Lever Initiative at the Oberlin Group, to that report, and it was pretty clear that scholars are really looking to be published for tenure and promotion. And that a big chunk of that is peer review. So peer review is incredibly important, and I will say that university presses, as compared to for-profit scholarly publishers, are known for peer review. And so I think that that is something that we need to continue as university presses and associate members of the university press community to make sure that we are providing the best peer review for scholars. Also, I think what is being put on the table today with the AAU-ARL and the Mellon Foundation can help scholars in that that same Oberlin study, 80% of scholars said that they get published, and of that 20%, there’s certainly quality publication going on there, but there’s a certain percentage of those scholars who don’t get published. And one of the reasons is because our financial responsibility. Typically, we are publishing books that we lose money on, which we can’t do that over and over again, so there is some scholarship where we just can’t make the numbers work. And I think that’s where these two plans that we’re talking about today can really help scholars and help the library community and the university press community.

Helen Cullyer: Thank you very much. So again, Charles, Raym, and Barbara made some really important points and I think I’d like to follow up on all of them, really. As Charles said, the need to publish is becoming increasingly important to scholars in the humanities. And because they’re working with a lot of digital collections or data sets, they’re using computational techniques. They want to present maps, maybe they’re using multimedia. There are a variety of reasons to want to publish in a digital medium. Barbara mentioned peer review. There are not good peer review standards really established for rich multimedia-based, -driven publications, especially those having software tools, and there are certainly not established tenure and promotion criteria in most fields. And so we’re trying to address those issues in a number of different ways and especially with tenure and promotion guidelines with the American Historical Association, CAA, College Art Association, and Society of Art Historians to really try and address that because that’s one important thing. And in addition to the sort of desire to publish digitally amongst many, certainly not all scholars, but many, there’s been the question of who is going to see that scholarship, how it’s going to be used. And we came to the conclusion that digital scholarly publications rather than the traditional monographs in the digital medium or those that bridged more traditional genres really could benefit from being out there on the open web, firstly to generate more readers, and secondly to make those publications more usable, to have them linked to related publications and collections so those publications can be searched, mined, analyzed, along with primary sources and other types of digital data collections. But obviously, to make a large portion of humanities scholarship openly accessible, accessible on an open access basis, is a huge sustainability challenge for the scholarly ecosystem and university presses to realize that. So we started thinking about possible different economic models, and so this is where Raym, right around the same time that the ARLAAU came up with their first book initiative, we had started thinking very much along the same lines. And we started thinking, Well, what would happen if instead of pay-to-read model, publishers experimented with a pay-to-publish model, so really meaning the institutions would then cost of their humanities faculty when those faculty are publishing more works. Those works would then be published on an open access basis by publishers according to standard editorial peer-review criteria, vanity publishing. No money would change hands until a contract could be issued, and according to the pretty standard open access licensing terms, and there may be some preservation requirement as well. And we thought possibly we could use grant funding to seed such a program. What we don’t know yet is whether that pay-to-publish model is even feasible. Of course, institutions would have to better cost themselves, and there are many possible barriers to that happening. So the current standards of this initiative are that we have two grants pending, and those pending grants would enable three institutions, because one of the grants is collaborative, to really do some pretty serious planning and do a walkthrough of how would this look like from the intuitional, the university college perspective? How would provosts and deans allocate the money to faculty? Which faculty would be eligible? What would be the licensing terms that the universities and colleges would require? Where would the pay-to-publish money even come from? We imagine, of course, this would have to be a reallocation from somewhere. Money doesn’t just grow on trees. So we are hoping that these institutions will be able to sort of go through this process and really come up with some conclusions about the feasibility of this model. And based on the outcomes of those studies, we might do some more planning and more research or we might decide to go ahead with some kind of experimental grant program or not. We might just say no, this isn’t going to work. So that’s where we are. We’re also very much thinking about the press side. And as many of you know, we initiated our university presses over the summer. The proposals that would enable presses to develop really shared infrastructure for the publication of digital works, and that includes digital monographs but also some of these more sort of nontraditional forms. And as Charles said, sort of thinking what a monograph is is pretty blurry right now. So there’s even a problem with the language. What do we mean by a monograph at this stage? I think I’ve gone on for too long, and I didn’t say one thing; I talked about many things that need to be done.

Leila Salisbury: No, no, thank you. Well, and this leads me to think, I’ll ask a question. Is there a crisis in monograph publishing? This is the thing we hear all the time. Or is it more, is it that faculty cannot get these tenure books published or is the problem how the books are being published or is the problem that there may be very limited market once those books are published, or is the problem all of the above? Do you have comments?

Raym Crow: Yes, in the whitepaper they estimated how many faculty would be publishing a first book, try to estimate what the market was and what the cost would be for the institutions participating in it. So in looking at that, just focusing on North American university presses, not looking at Anglo-American presses or looking at commercial publishers, the ballpark was about 85% of faculty, junior faculty’s first books and seeking books for tenure could get published. The issue with the first books convention tries to address is the fact that we want to decouple the evaluation of books for tenure from commercial liability. Barbara said presses can’t publish everything they might want to publish, especially if they’re very specialized monographs. There’s a positive externality for universities to use these books for tenure. They can’t be captured by a title’s price. So that’s the idea of the first books convention was again, it was this convention that covered all the first copy costs of the press. How that would be set is a detail that needed to be worked out, but also the opportunity costs of a press. That’s better than the, would actually give more options. There wouldn’t be a partial run on presses to do.

Leila Salisbury: Did anyone else have anything?

Charles Watkinson: I think that maybe from an author point of view, there isn’t that much of a monograph crisis. And I feel that I’m on delicate ground here, that it certainly is true that we’re seeing at university presses a market where we’re competing with new and even more aggressive commercial humanities and social science book publishers who are increasing their output every year. And it feels a little bit from the university press side like it’s a Dr. Jekyll and Dr. Hyde situation that we’re facing where our editorial boards are telling us we have to invest very heavily in the very highly intensive work of producing a monograph, but when they act as authors, they are sometimes choosing speed over those values. So I think from the point of view of, the monograph crisis is for publishers like University of Michigan Press who have high costs are very invested in a very intensive design process and are at risk of being undercut sometimes. And I don’t know if they do a good point version.

Helen Cullyer: Okay, I think this is a really difficult question. I think overall, the language of the crisis is probably unhelpful. And scholarly not-for-profit publishing, economic sustainability, and the ability of people to get published I think will always be an issue. I think, we commissioned a study about monograph output in the US, not just books, all monographs. And we received that data. We have yet to go down into it and sort of look at it by discipline and field. I think probably what that will reveal is what we get a sense of anecdotally, that in some fields there really is a problem and scholars do have problems getting published. Literary studies is one we hear a lot. But the flip side of that is, as we’ve been talking to faculty, some people say, Well, too many monographs are being published. And by that, they mean that the monograph is not necessarily the most appropriate form sometimes of humanistic scholarship. And of course, the monograph is the most standard of the tenure and promotions. So almost everyone in every humanities field, there are some exceptions, have to publish at least one monograph in their scholarly career. And so I think that the monograph crisis or one of our problems, if there is one, has multiple dimensions. And while I certainly don’t think the monograph is dead or should ever be dead as a genre, it’s a very, very important form of publication, there are certainly other, maybe more experimental forms that can and should grow up and that should receive vigorous peer review and full credit.

Leila Salisbury: You talked about some of the nuance that we don’t necessarily discuss with monographs, and I’m curious, it’s sort of the old story that monograph sales can be very limited. I mean, print runs in the low hundreds now at many university press publishers, and I think that sometimes to the outer community, that low number sort of indicated that these are books, and I hate it when people say this, that no one needs or shouldn’t be published. And I guess I’d like to talk, dig into that a little more deeply. Is it more a discoverability problem, these things are out there, but in the past, we haven’t had the greatest tools for helping these things be discovered, or is it really a money problem? One of the things that I’ve been hearing in these discussions in the last few days as we’re talking more about use data through different types of collection development programs. My sense very much is switching to that it’s not that this content’s not being used, it’s not necessarily being sold in a way that brings the same revenue back to the publishers and may not be sustainable. Can you talk a little bit about these issues?

Barbara Kline Pope: I think I’ve got to now mention this as well as Director of the National Academies Press. Because I can shed a little bit of light on the discoverability of books and how that changed from when you go from just selling a printed book to posting content in discoverable ways. And then we went to actually posting content in ways that are actually substitutable for a printed book. And we know that opening up the content a bit or opening it up a lot, really more broadly, disseminates the content. We get more downloads of that content as we got more and more open. But it’s a scary thing for a press to do that. And luckily, we were part of the National Academy of Sciences. The books that we published are central products of that entire huge institution, and so they put the money there to allow us to do that. So I think discoverability is certainly a great concept to think about when you think about open or public access, but we also need the data, and we need the data for the humanities to determine these kind of scary questions. For the sciences, we collected data. We did it at the beginning of the century, actually. In the year 2000 we looked at this to determine what is the revenue lost of completely free in PDF. What is the revenue lost and the revenue gained in different formats? And we had arguments in the year 2000 before we actually did this research. And in fact, Mellon funded this research for us. And I think now various communities are in those arguments with one side saying it must be open, the other side saying it must be closed. That’s because we don’t have the data. And what I would like to see is for the humanities, for us to do another study like that, determine really what is the cost and what is the benefit of going open. And I kind of call on Mellon to maybe help us in that.

Raym Crow: I don’t disagree with anything you say. I think one of the points behind the supply-side model is to remove the risk of the press of these very specialized monographs that sell a few hundred copies. One suspects with DDA and PDA purchasing are going to get even lower and lower and lower. And so it’s a big press goal to gather some of the value from the institutions.

Barbara Kline Pope: And there is a study going on to determine what a true cost is. What is the true value that a university press puts into a monograph? And I think that’s really important. But it’s also important to look at that as entire cost, overhead cost, and what a press needs to really help scholars not only produce that book but also to help that scholar look at their line of inquiry, get involved in that scholar’s life, you know, the role of that petition setter is incredibly important in moving disciplines forward. So I think we need to be very careful about using this data to do it.

Helen Cullyer: I definitely agree with the need to collect data and still be on top of the costs of monographs that Barbara alluded to, what funding is being conducted. To go back to Leila’s original question, is discoverability or money really the problem, I do think it’s both. I think that both issues, and we’re going to come back to the discoverability later this session, but just to make a point now, we’re putting something up on the web, on the open web, to make it discoverable. Lots of the things on the open web are really hidden because they don’t come up on the first couple pages of a Google search or other kind of search engine.

Charles Watkinson: I do think there’s an interesting aspect of the discoverability problem, which is that in the digital space, it feels like monographs haven’t been given much of a chance yet. So I think it is a bit of an issue when we, from the press side, look at the general perception that the content that we produce is not used at all. And that is a big narrative. That there may be a strong issue of digital accessibility in there and probably we need to wait a little bit to make those presumptions until we have good data from databases that combine journal and book content in the same space, because anecdotally, there is some good news of some e-book collections that we know of. So that’s just one point on discoverability that monographs are not necessarily not used. We just don’t really know yet, I think. I could be corrected on that. Just about the money problem, I mean, it is very interesting to talk to colleagues here from libraries, from acquisitions and collections development side and talk about the halving of monograph budgets a few years ago. From the university press angle, we’re definitely seeing that very starkly. So at University of Michigan Press, we’ve seen a decline in revenue of about a third over the last five years, and we’re a very heavily monograph-based press. And that’s a pretty scary thing to be seeing. And I think it’s a result of those cuts and it’s just taken a while to hit us.

Leila Salisbury: Well, this links into something else I wanted to talk about with these OA materials. How can we get data about these open access materials? It’s one thing when we can work through vendors that might handle OA content. There is the question of, well, it’s OA. How is that worked through the vendor? If the library publishing program is putting together material that some might say, well, it exists in the silo. How is the user data being shared? How is discoverability driven from that one particular institution to other institutions more widely? Can you all talk about some of these questions? I mean, for publishers, if we feel like we want to get into this, we need some answers to show how the work we put into this is going to be meaningful.

Raym Crow: Well, from one perspective, I think the openness will increase use. But kind of the conventional model really captures the value from the institution; it’s really the quality of the scholarship that’s being validated. And so subsequent use is important, but it’s not because it drives the value from the institution’s perspective. So again, the idea that this is set at a level where the pressures in different, in that kind of detail, I mean, at this point, it’s internal. But the goal in the concept is to alleviate present risks, not increase it. And the idea is that most presses aren’t making lots of money on first books. And that’s wrong, I think. It’s basically saying, in terms of first books, capturing the value of the institutions, so it takes the risk out of it and you don’t have to worry about commercial liability and making publishing decisions.

Barbara Kline Pope: I think also discoverability is incredibly important. And as I said before, I’m not representing all university presses when I talk about open access. We do know that sometimes when a book is free, the ratio of free downloads to sales is 100 to one. We do know that that helps, but it doesn’t help if you don’t actually draw people to that content. And I think what Leila and Raym have been referring to we’re going to talk about later is just posting a file and having it be free and expecting people to find it. That doesn’t work. And so the knowledge of all people in the marketing groups in these university presses gave them their audiences. They know how to promote these books. They know what awards they should go to. They know what reviews they can get for these books. They know how to generate buzz about these books. And you need that kind of critical knowledge, that kind of critical skills whether the file is free, whether this scholarship is free or whether it’s for sale. And I think many of us think that, Oh, it’s free, just post this file. And it is relatively inexpensive as a cost of the next file to post once you have the infrastructure there, but that’s not what you want. You really want people to use that scholarship now that it is free.

Helen Cullyer: Okay, so on discoverability, I think there should be many ways, many methods by which publications should be made discoverable in order to reach a wide variety of audiences. Marketing is certainly one of them. Search engine optimization. The role of repositories and aggregators who, as Charles said, can make e-books better go along with journals and other content. Use of the link to open data. And also the role of libraries, naturally, in making sure that for open access publications, there are records for those publications and links to publications in their discovery into things. And I think that’s really important because I think there’s still a perception in some areas of the academy that, well, it’s just out there on the web. It’s not a real publication. Sometimes people have a print of a university press. It’s silly, but the publications need to be discoverable, open access publications alongside those publications which libraries have acquired for a fee. I think that’s really important. On usage statistics, I also think that’s crucial. As funders, I don’t think we’re in a position to dictate what sort of usage statistics presses want and need. I think we need to get that from presses, and we’d certainly be willing to assist if more work is needed in this area. One issue that I think someone alluded to was content that was published under open licenses is just that even if it’s distributed sort of by a standard, the publishers might have a bunch of other content, some open access, some not, and so you’re getting standardized usage statistics that way. What happens if someone downloads that content and then republishes it and redistributes it? And how could you get meaningful usage statistics about feedback and published content? We had a conversation with the CEO of Creative Commons a while ago, and he mentioned one strategy that we’re thinking of is to actually place some kind of tracking device in seed licenses so that you actually know where that stuff is republished, and I think that would be fantastic. That really would be that openly licensed material, you could actually get pretty comprehensive usage statistics back. I don’t know if Creative Commons will do that, but it’s certainly something that they’re thinking about and discussing.

Barbara Kline Pope: I would think there’d be privacy issues with that as well.

Charles Watkinson: I just want to echo Helen on that. I’ve been in charge of two educational repositories, one at Purdue and one at Michigan, and all of us involved in the repository movement know that usage stats are the currency of open access. And it is an absolute precondition of any platform that has open access books on it that it needs to have rich usage stats and those need to be pushing out. They’re not just things that people go and retrieve. They need to push out to the publisher, to the author, to the funder, and that is the only way sustainable open access monographs are going to happen. It’s absolutely essential. The other thing I would say is I think it’s particularly relevant to a region like Charleston to really appeal to the aggregators and the jobbers to think very carefully about how open access monographs are going to fit into their workflows. And I would pull also on the librarians to be ready to pay the self-ready fee for an open access book because it is, again, essential if anybody cares about open access that this content is brought into the same environment through the same workflows as all the scholarship that you’ll currently find.

Raym Crow: I just want to add one thing. I mean, there’s nothing being proposed in the AAU-ARL proposal suggests that open access content would just be put up and then people could trip over it. You sort of mentioned to cover the cost of the market was negotiated. Even in the market now, sort of sell a few hundred copies. So an open system contributes to it if that is a recognized value by institutions.

Barbara Kline Pope: And also, if the open content sits on a publisher’s website, that also brings eyeballs to the rest of the scholarship there. It gets additional downloads, gets additional reading and perhaps purchase of other books. So it’s important that publishers also have the file not just sitting out there.

Leila Salisbury: If we’re looking at really flipping things as we’ve been short-handing it to a pay-to-publish monograph model, this is something, this is called the free writer problem for university presses. And certainly Macmillan is looking at this now, but I think the question may be, where do these institutional grants come from? You alluded to it a little bit. I would posit there may be a fear from university presses, for example, this is a situation where universities say, Well, we have this key thing, a piece of the pie for scholarly publications, kind of being asked to contribute however many thousands of dollars towards one of these first monographs or monograph initiatives. How can we help ensure maybe that that money doesn’t all just come out of a press’s institutional allocation or it is just shifting around money, is it going to make things worse to some extent for some of the university presses? Or inversely, I’ve heard a lot of publishers express fear of even more of a class system or a tiering system among university presses. And I’m sure, Helen, you’ve probably got some of these issues maybe not answers yet, but if you could talk a bit about them.

Helen Cullyer: Yeah. I would say we don’t have the answers yet on where funds would come from at universities and colleges. I think there has to be some different creative thinking about them. When we float the idea, obviously every constituency within the institution is worried that the funds will come from their budget. The library is worried, the faculty are worried the funds might be taken from their research funds they currently get and so maybe they get the pay-to-publish funds but they wouldn’t get research funds to travel, to go to conferences, and things like that. So I don’t have the answers. And it may be that we conclude that it wouldn’t just be moving money around in a way that’s detrimental, but we don’t know that yet. University finances are incredibly complicated, and there need to be multiple people involved in the discussions to figure out whether this is actually feasible or not and different institutions may come up with different answers. Another worry is that maybe, and this speaks to the class system for institutions, actually, maybe not for presses, though I’ll speak to them in a bit, there may be some institutions that just can’t afford to do this. Might there be ways that Mellon can sort of address that problem? As far as the presses go, can you just explain to me again about the class system for the presses and what your particular worry was there?

Leila Salisbury: Well, we’re competing for content all the time, and so are projects that come with money being evaluated differently by the presses or are they more attractive to, is everyone going to want to take their publication to one of the big, probably financially healthier university presses? It seems to maybe put smaller university presses at even more of a disadvantage.

Helen Cullyer: It might do. I think to determine that, we have to run some experiments after we determine the feasibility at the university level. And as I’m sure you all realize, I’ve been talking, we imagine that exploration as potentially a multiyear process. And we certainly don’t think it will be possible or wise to try and sort of flip the model, as you put it, overnight. We can’t do that, we shouldn’t do that. So there have got to be multiple levels of planning and possibly experimentation.

Raym Crow: In terms of the cost, now I’m talking here about the traditional specialized monographs as opposed to the digital projects that Mellon is looking at, the estimate we used coming out of the whitepaper, I’m using a fairly high per title subscription level of $20,000. For a large research institution, on average it’d be about $75,000 a year. And even at smaller institutions, you get down to, at smaller institutions it’d probably be about $2,500 a year because they have fewer faculty looking for tenure. So in terms of it not being affordable, that seems unlikely. So that’s one issue. Any attempt to increase that subscription has to increase it, it would still be affordable for first books. In terms of the inequity court for small presses, the idea behind this from the outset was you need to get critical mass of presses participating. Otherwise, you’re right, individual presses can’t do a lot, really, to do this kind of thing. It has to be most if not all the presses. The economic logic is such in my mind that in the large presses, they don’t need it, but still it’d be thought about to take it because they’d be able to use it for their mission. So the economic side of this effort, anybody could do it. And the idea is that if everyone is participating in it, no one’s disadvantaged by, painted by the idea that it’s bad to be published.

Charles Watkinson: I had to mention some research projects that Mellon might to be considering, and at the University of Michigan and two of the institutions, that’s a collaborative project that we’ve proposed to the Mellon Foundation to look into what happens at the institution level. And I think it’s a major concern, or it’s certainly a big question mark which we want to get ahead of, which is whether the institutional administration looks at where to take funding from. The press is an obvious place and the library budget is an obvious place. Just to clarify something, I mean, in the proposal rates talking about the AAU-ARL proposal, that is a first books proposal and that is a relatively manageable amount of money; but if we talk about all books, we do not yet know the dimensions of that kind of thing, and it could be substantial. I think that’s definitely an issue to look at. Just one thing creates other issues or losses for authors and scholars. So when we started talking about the submission of this proposal to the Mellon Foundation and so on with humanities scholars locally in Michigan, their immediate reaction was, These kind of systems are going to be fine for us at the University of Michigan, a well-funded research university. But we’re very worried about our colleagues in small colleges, and we’re very worried about independent scholars, and we’re very worried about scholars in our network outside the United States. So I think we know that with open access journal publishing, a whole group of scholars are disenfranchised. And that is a particular concern I think we need to have as we enter the open access monograph world.

Raym Crow: Well, again, I think that it places the focus on first books because there’s really no reason to provide a submission for second and third books. I mean, the market model should work for those books. It’s whether there’s this positive externality for the institution that’s using the first book conventionally. So I think Charles is right, but I think we need to focus on the AAU-ARL proposal for what it is, again, first books makes sense in that.

Helen Cullyer: To go back to what Charles was saying about disenfranchising scholars, that’s certainly a concern in addition to independent scholars and adjuncts. I don’t think you mentioned adjuncts just now, but we talked about it out in the hall the other week. And we’ll see what further research and we’ll have to see what the outcomes of research and planning initiatives are. But I think it’s highly unlikely that most institutions would say, Yeah, we’ll give our adjuncts these pay-to-publish funds. It’s sad, but I think that’s the truth. And then we as a foundation and possibly as a fund, we have to think very carefully about the methods by which such funding might be able to be provided to the adjuncts and independent scholars, and this may involve Scholarly Communications.

Leila Salisbury: I’m going to change gears just a little bit. I wonder if I could ask everybody to just briefly, because I do want to leave some time for questions, talk about a couple of things that either your organization or within the Scholarly Communications ecosystem we should stop doing when it comes to how we’ve traditionally been disseminating the development of scholarly content. So what would not doing these activities do to improve the situation?

Charles Watkinson: I think as university presses, we have to stop creating Rolls-Royces when authors need Toyotas. And you would be amazed how hard that is to manage within a particular university press because there is a strong commitment to quality that is embedded in every university press employee. So it’s a hard message, but it’s a necessary message.

Raym Crow: And to that point, I’m sure that that’s the case because an institution would only want to pay for that level of service that was needed potentially. So in terms of the press, myself, obviously, but what I would like to see people stop doing is looking for others to solve the problem. And I’m not saying anybody’s shirking here, but it makes talking to solutions or presses, faculty, and institutions, funders come together to address the situation. And the presses stand for it unilaterally. The faculty obviously can’t do it unilaterally, nor can the institutions. So I think there needs to be more talked about.

Barbara Kline Pope: I think from my own perspective, and it could be that the university press community might get there as well, when I read this question from Leila, I had trouble figuring out what she’s not doing because I think it’s having to break even, and in advanced scholarship, you have to stop doing things in order to make that happen as publishing has evolved so quickly. I mean, this is really fast evolution. So just one of the things we stopped doing a while ago were scientific publishers, and we spent lots and lots of time over the decades trying to talk bookstores into carrying our books. When the web came along and we could connect to our readers directly, we started to put our money in that and stopped trying to talk bookstores into doing that. And I think that while we have a rigorous peer review system and our content is incredibly high quality, our product is more like a Smart Car.

Helen Cullyer: We downgraded from the Toyota to the Smart Car.

Barbara Kline Pope: We had to.

Helen Cullyer: I guess I’ll speak from a different question, which is what should we stop funding? And I actually had difficulty with this question because my original answer I realized was slightly problematic, so I’ll just take you through my thought process. My original answer was going to be, We should stop funding, and in many ways we have stopped funding, the cool, one-off digital projects and start funding infrastructure for reproducible forms of digital publication and especially these new forms of interactive scholarly works involving media and data and maps and all those sorts of things. And then I thought, Well, that’s sort of, that’s hard to do when those forms haven’t yet emerged. And sometimes the cool, one-off little scholarly project, what looks like one may be an example of a new reproducible form. So I think that’s where we are. How do you pull project experimentation and really the development of what we think will probably be new genres and on the other hand push on as a funder development of some sort of infrastructure for something that yet maybe doesn’t exist?

Leila Salisbury: I think you’ve described the quandary for many university presses as we think about how to allocate our own funds in exactly that kind of way. Charles, did you have something?

Charles Watkinson: No, I was just thinking about time.

Leila Salisbury: Right, go ahead. We’ve got about five minutes left. Open it up. Questions from the audience. Got a great set of people here. Thank you.

The Punishment for Dreamers: Big Data, Retention, and Academic Libraries

Adam L. Murray, Dean of University Libraries Murray State University

Copyright of this contribution remains in the name of the author(s). http://dx.doi.org/10.5703/1288284315628

The following is a lightly edited transcript of a live presentation at the 2014 Charleston Conference. Slides and videos are available at http://2014charlestonconference.sched.org/

Adam Murray: Thank you, everybody for being here. I know it’s the Saturday morning of the Charleston Conference, so you guys are definitely the very dedicated group here to hear about some exciting things, assessment. I know everyone loves to talk about assessment. But hopefully we’re going to be able to make this a pretty exciting session for you. My name is Adam Murray. I’m the Dean of Libraries at Murray State University in Kentucky. And just to set aside any rumors because this is something the vendors love to ask, no, the university is not named for me. We’re going to have a Q&A session after the presentation. But if you don’t get a chance to ask your questions or if you think of something later that you’d like to follow up with me, my email address is up here along with my Twitter. I’ll have this information again at the end of the slide or the end of the presentation if you didn’t grab it at the time. So I look forward to hearing from anyone who has follow up questions after the fact.

Of course the theme for this year’s Charleston Conference is based on an Oscar Wilde quote, and so is the theme for this presentation. A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world. So I thought this quote was very pertinent for talking about retention and things like student success, because in the context of higher education there is definitely a new dawn coming, a new day coming for higher education. Higher education is under an incredible amount of pressure from a wide array of stakeholders. And assessment is changing. The data is making different methods of assessment possible and libraries have to figure out, they have to find their way by moonlight with little guidance on how to use these assessment methods in order to demonstrate value and communicate impact.

As librarians, we spend a lot of our time focused internally. We think a lot about our services and our resources. We take a look at uses. We spend a lot of time refining our services and resources. So I think it’s good every once in a while for us to take a step back and really look at the very broad and complex picture of higher education. Of course everyone knows about decreased state funding. That’s the first thing that a lot of people think about when they talk about the pressures that higher ed faces. So we’ll talk a little bit about just how much state funding has decreased. But along with that, there are a lot of other pressures coming from the states and from the federal government, including an increased expectation for universal access. Everyone thinks of college and a degree now as the means of access into a career. This is a credential. So we want everyone to be able to do this. This is something that all students coming out of high school should go into college, get an undergraduate degree in order to be able to place themselves in a career. So there’s an increased expectation for that universal access. Linked in with that, in order to make universal access a little bit more possible are increasing pressures to keep costs contained and to keep tuition low. Also linked in with universal access is the fact that a lot of our institutions have had drives for enrollment. We’re admitting students that probably are not college ready, so we have a lot more remediation that we have to provide. So there’s an increased need for students to take classes in order to bring themselves up to the necessary skills that they need to complete college. So those are some of the pressures coming from the state and from the federal government.

Other stakeholders have a very different and sometimes competing expectations for higher education. So for students they expect an idealized social experience. How many of you have been in some of the newer dorm rooms or dorm buildings on your campuses? They’re nice, aren’t they? They look a lot like a hotel. They’re a lot nicer than what I lived in when I was an undergraduate. Students want that idealized social experience. They want what they’ve seen kind of perpetuated as a stereotype of the college experience: the tailgating, and the nice wellness centers, and fantastic residency experiences. That all costs money, of course. Parents and nontraditional students see higher ed as a credentialing agent for career advancement. They want, parents want their students to go to college to get a degree and to be able to move out and pay their own bills. And nontraditional students come back to maybe complete a degree or to obtain an additional credential or certificate to continue moving up the job ladder. So let’s talk about employers. Once those traditional or non-traditional students graduate how are employers of our graduates thinking about the skills that we produce in higher ed? Overall, nationally there’s dissatisfaction with student learning outcomes. Employers tend to want students that are able to write effectively, communicate effectively, and demonstrate critical and creative thinking, problem-solving skills. And overall nationally, there’s a trend that they are not seeing this in our graduates. And then accreditation is always a fun thing to do, and it’s always a constantly moving target. How many of you have had to rewrite some of your own self-studies because you found out some new standards are coming down from your accrediting agency or from some of the discipline level accrediting agencies? So these are a sampling of the pressures and the different constituency groups that have competing expectations for higher education.

Let’s talk a little bit about the financial crunch for higher ed. And this really boils down the formula for an institution’s funding model to a very simple set of three factors, state funding, tuition as a factor of how many enrolled students there are, and external funding, grants, fundraising, other sources of revenue. So a very simplified model. Nationally, state funding for higher education has decreased by ten billion dollars since 2007. And that money is not going to come back, even as the economy improves that money is not going to come back. And if it does come back it’s going to come back in a different way and I’ll talk about that here in a second. So tuition as another factor that institutions can use to control their financial well-being. The percentage of educational revenue that is derived from tuition has climbed to nearly 50% in the last few years. And, of course, this is catching a lot of attention by the federal government and by state legislators. So they are increasing pressures to keep tuition down. So that really leaves … of this formula, setting aside the grants and the external funding, of this formula the only item that institutions of higher education have that they can do something about is enrolled students. So, keep getting students enrolled and keeping them enrolled has become a very high stakes endeavor. On the topic of enrollment, there are declining populations of traditional college age students. How many of you … I’m curious by show of hands … how many of you have heard this kind of rhetoric in your area, that high schools-? Yup, most. High school are not graduating enough students. There are not enough students of a traditional college age coming out of