Academics and Industry Issue Pact to Guide the Evolution of Scholarly Publishing By DENISE K. MAGNER
The world of scholarly publishing -- shaken by sharp increases in both the cost and the sheer volume of academic journals -- cannot be sustained, according to an agreement released today by a group of campus administrators, publishers, librarians, and association leaders. Joining forces, they have crafted a set of nine principles to "guide the transformation of the scholarly publishing system."
The unprecedented agreement, coordinated by the Association of American Universities and the Association of Research Libraries, calls for changes in the relationships among publishers, universities, disciplinary societies, and faculty members.
The agreement, "Principles for Emerging Systems of Scholarly Publishing," recommends that the various players, working independently or together, seek to accomplish the following:
* Reduce the emphasis on the quantity of publications in evaluating a professor's work. * Speed up the process from submission of an article to its publication. * Collaborate on new publishing ventures to create alternatives to high-cost journals. * Find new approaches to peer review of articles in an electronic age. * Develop common coding standards to assure wide access to scholarship on the Web.
"The current system of scholarly publishing has become too costly for the academic community to sustain," according to an introduction to the nine principles. "Numerous studies, conferences, and roundtable discussions over the past decade have analyzed the underlying causes and recommended solutions to the scholarly publishing crisis. Many new publishing models have emerged. A lack of consensus and concerted action by the academic community, however, continues to allow the escalation of prices and volume."
For the first time, said John C. Vaughn, executive vice president of the Association of American Universities, representatives of the various participants in academic publishing "have agreed on a set of characteristics that ought to define the scholarly publishing system." His organization is urging presidents of its member institutions to create special forums on their campuses to discuss the crisis. "If we can get a broad buy-in to these characteristics," he said, "then we've got a template to use to try to fix a broken system."
The problems in scholarly publishing are well-known: the choked library budgets as journal prices in science, technology, and medical fields have skyrocketed; the proliferation in the actual number of journals published; and the "death" of the scholarly monograph in the humanities, as libraries have had less money to purchase books and young scholars have reported increased difficulties getting their first books published.
"Cost is the whole issue," said Daryle H. Busch, president of the American Chemical Society and a professor of chemistry at the University of Kansas who was among the 36 signatories. "Some journals cost more than others, and there are more journals than there used to be. Every faculty member gets a list of journals that are going to be discontinued at their campus library -- this happens once or twice a year on every campus."
The nine principles were first debated last spring at an invitation-only meeting in Tempe, Ariz. In the months that followed, the document was further refined via e-mail. The plan is for participants to circulate the principles -- both the A.A.U. and the research-library group plan to send copies of the document to member institutions -- with the goal of reaching a broader consensus across academe about how to proceed. The two organizations also plan to assemble a national committee in the next few months to monitor the debate and try to move it forward.
But even within the circle of 36 signatories, however, consensus was not easily reached, said Duane Webster, executive director of the Association of Research Libraries. "Academic institutions were concerned about costs. Librarians were promoting access. The presses were concerned with assuring their contributors an effective presence in the marketplace," he said. "Where we got agreement was the sense that we have to work together to shape the future."
A handful of large commercial publishers get the most blame for the escalating journal prices, but those companies were intentionally not invited to the discussions. "We thought it was important to specify what the academic community wanted," said David E. Shulenburger, provost at the University of Kansas, which sponsored the Tempe meeting along with the A.A.U. and A.R.L. "I certainly hope commercial publishers will be a part of the solution, but it's important for those of us in the academic community to express the problem."
He and other signatories say they are trying to wake up faculty members who haven't paid much attention to the crisis in publishing. "The real call is for faculty to understand what is going on in the marketplace, what is going on in technology, and to be a part of the debate," said Mr. Webster, of the research-library group. "And right now, they're not."
One of the more controversial recommendations calls on professors to "refrain from submitting their work and assigning copyright to expensive journals when high quality inexpensive publication outlets are available." The framers of the principles know that is asking a lot. "If you're an assistant professor up for tenure and the most prestigious journal is a commercial journal, then that's where you have to publish," lacking an alternative, said the A.A.U.'s Mr. Vaughn.
That's why the agreement urges faculty members, universities, and disciplinary societies to experiment with alternatives. Many already are making forays into electronic publishing to offer lower-priced alternatives to the expensive journals. Last May, for example, the chemical society began publishing, in print and on the Web, Organic Letters, a journal intended to compete with Tetrahedron Letters, published by Reed Elsevier. Organic Letters costs $2,438 a year for 26 issues, a third the price of Tetrahedron Letters, a weekly. (See an article from The Chronicle, July 1, 1998.)
"The control of academic output cannot be in the hands of a few commercial publishers who are seeking to exploit a narrow and profitable market niche," Mr. Webster said.
The agreement also calls on institutions and faculty members to rethink an academic credentialing system that "encourages faculty members to publish some work that may add little to the body of knowledge." That is, in part, a reference to the way that some professors publish research results in a handful of small articles, rather than a single large one, in order to make their record of scholarship look more prolific. The agreement recommends that faculty members be evaluated "on the quality and contribution made by a small, fixed number of published works, allowing the review to emphasize quality" over quantity.
Professors are acting "rationally" by seeking to publish lots of articles because "that's the way the system works now," said Myles Brand, president of Indiana University and one of the 36 signatories of the document. In considering tenure cases, university personnel committees "place great emphasis on a certain level of productivity," he said. But rather than amass enormous vitae, he would like to see decisions in tenure cases focus on a small number of a professor's most significant pieces of work.
Many signatories, however, acknowledged that that sort of a change in academic culture would be a tough sell. Even if one institution urges its faculty members to limit the number of articles they write, those scholars could run into trouble finding jobs on other campuses where quantity still counts.
The problem is that it is tough to generalize, said Mr. Shulenburger of Kansas. "There are some extraordinary scholars who are extraordinarily prolific and everything they produce is gold," he said, and there are some not-so-extraordinary scholars "who produce a lot of articles to make themselves more marketable."
The principle that many participants said was toughest to reach agreement on was the one that involved copyright and fair use. That's why the agreement doesn't take much of a stand on either side, other than to call for a balance between the two.
But the agreement does harshly criticize publishers who have forced scholars to sign overly restrictive contracts. In the past, professors have "transferred without direct compensation all of their copyrights to journal publishers in return for wide distribution of their work," the document says. "In some cases this tradition has resulted in the need for faculty to seek permission and pay a fee to use their own work. It is critical that faculty authors retain the rights to use their own works in their teaching and in subsequent publications." The agreement urges universities to adopt policies requiring professors to retain such rights, and said professors could use such policies as a bargaining tool in their contract negotiations with publishers.