Abstract
The expert speakers from the publishing, librarian, and vendor communities regrouped at the end of the Society for Scholarly Publishing–NASIG Joint Meeting to answer questions or elaborate on information they presented earlier during the meeting.
After thanking the societies for hosting the Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP)-NASIG Joint Meeting and the audience, Bob Boissy launched into questions for the panelists.
QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
Best Practices and Orphan Works
BOB BOISSY. We didn’t get to orphan works. I have a question to ask of Michael and Peter. When a publisher wants to go back and digitize their archive and the publisher holds the print copyright, but they don’t have anything on the document that gives them the right to digitize it, is there a measure of the law or best practice that says this is what a publisher’s best efforts can be to get at that author permission? Can they protect themselves if they choose to digitize after best efforts, and then the copyright holder shows up later? Is there a legal protection if best efforts are followed?
MICHAEL REMINGTON. I can say that it’s unclear whether there is legal protection. [Audience laughter.] I worked on best practices for photography between photo finishers and the professional photographers around 1995 or 1996. The good news is that I don’t think that there’s been a single lawsuit. By the way, photo finishers moved from Ritz Camera and others in this area to Walmart, Costco and so forth, and almost everybody adopted these best practices.Footnote1 In the long society analysis, there has been no litigation, which I think is terrific news. There are a couple of court cases that set nice statements about best practices. They thought people were being honest and did the right thing, but it’s not a green light or a red light. I believe that best practices are the way to go in some of these touchy areas. Not too many judges will slam somebody who is engaged in sound business practices.
PETER JASZI. I think that is a very, very cogent response. The discussion that has taken place in and around Congress in mid-August on this issue, and that led up to the Shawn Bentley Act of 2008 which passed the Senate but ultimately failed in the House was essentially organized around the principle that Mike Remington described, that is to say, that under that legislative approach an entity or an individual who follows best practices will be excused from most forms of liability or otherwise good faith use as described.Footnote2 Interestingly, there has been really, as far as I can tell, no revival of interest in recent years in that approach. The orphan works issue, unfortunately in my mind, has been subsumed into the mass digitization issue. It is also unfortunate, in my opinion, that bureaucratic solutions are now being proposed for each. If we were able somehow to turn the clock back a decade and begin the discussion again, we could begin with a best practices approach. We could have a discussion in which for once the librarians and the publishers held hands. After all, most of the legislative proceedings were not due to either of them, but rather to certain rogue parties on both the owners and the users’ sides. If we were somehow able to go back ten years and reimagine the approach that was attempted then, I think it would probably, inevitably be a best practices approach. In the meantime, the one thing you can always say in one of these situations is that the actual measurable harm to an author or rights holder who has made an effort to trace his or her claims from an active digitization, be it by a publisher or be it by a non-profit institution, is fraught with trade-offs. There is risk that is worth assuming in order to accomplish an important mission.
Data Curation in Academia
BOB BOISSY. For my next question, which is for Scott (Plutchak), I’m assuming the role of a pretend provost. This is a provost from another school, not your school, who comes to you and says, “What is the real goal of an institution’s data curation efforts? Is it compliance with a government mandate? How will data curation really advance the mission of the institution?”
T. SCOTT PLUTCHAK. Since I’m talking to a provost, I would say, “Compliance.” [Audience laughter.] I like the way that Caitlin ended her presentation with the divine gift, the reason that many of us have been involved in open data, Open Access, open software development, whatever, is because we believe it’s a social good. Publishers care about it even when they are worried about what it means for their business model because they know it’s going to be better science. All of those things that we care about are the reasons that we get involved with this. A provost is going to be amenable theoretically to that point, but a provost has a dozen people with ideas for where a university should put its resources, all of which are going to include science, scholarship, and world gain. And so the provost has to choose. Again, I go back to Caitlin’s answer to the question about how you tell what’s just cool and what’s a trend. The slightly different version that I’ve used is you figure out what keeps the person in charge awake at night. If you can bring something to the table that helps that person sleep better, among the ten great ideas that the provost has to deal with, that’s the one that’s going to get the money. Compliance with all of these federal mandates is what gives us the hook. You can go back and say if you want to continue to be competitive and if you want me to get those grants, you are going to have to do really good data management plans and in order to do that, you are going to have to have a strategy that addresses data curation across the board.
Competition in Open Access versus Subscription Worlds
BOB BOISSY. Jayne (Marks), we talked a little about this earlier, but my question for you is: Is this Open Access world that we’re starting to really get into now in a serious way—is this a softer, kinder, gentler world, or is this as competitive as the subscription world?
JAYNE MARKS. Are there any editors or managing editors in the room?
AUDIENCE MEMBER. Yes.
JAYNE MARKS. Do you care more about your business model or going after really good content?
AUDIENCE MEMBER. I care more about the content as long as the business model is sustainable.
JAYNE MARKS. Any editor, managing editor, or anyone on the editorial team, really their mission in life is to find the best content, absolutely the best content. I don’t see any difference between business models because in general if it’s a hybrid Open Access, it happens after acceptance. If it’s truly a fully Open Access journal, that journal can be competing with another fully Open Access Journal or a subscription journal, but they’re all competing for the work of the same author. How they market their content once it’s published, how they manage their peer review all those kinds of things add to the author experience. The long answer is of course it varies from journal to journal. The short answer is every editor wants absolutely the best for their journal. I don’t see that diminishing competition in any way. And I don’t see it weakening in any way the striving for good quality.
Institutional Research as Marketing the Institution
BOB BOISSY. Caitlin (Trasande), I recently was at a regional conference and talking to a librarian from a school not far from where I live. I said, “How are things going at your school?” She said, “It looks good. It looks like we may have filled out the freshman class. We’re very dependent on tuition now.” It seemed like things were on an edge. I know there are other people in this room who might say that. They are far more worried about filling out the freshman class than retaining them. You were talking about research data and telling a story for the institution’s research. I guess I interpret that as marketing the institution or making that institution something that would be viable. Do you see what you do as marketing an institution?
CAITLIN TRASANDE. This is an excellent and insightful question. [Audience laughter.] Is anybody from CUNY in the room? City University of New York? I think CUNY is the largest public university in the United States, maybe off by one university, but it’s one of the largest by student number, with around 270,000 students in degree programs and almost 250,000 adult, continuing, and professional education students.Footnote3 In New York City you’ve got Columbia, an Ivy League institution; NYU; and others. CUNY has a lot of competition for freshman. CUNY has also been a stepping stone for the children of immigrants for decades, for generations really. It provides a vital, vital pipeline for the middle class in New York City. CUNY also is involved in research in police precincts and public schools. And that story is not as well-known as it could be. I emphasize in my conversations I’ve had with provosts, deans, and chancellors that this is not just CUNY; this is many universities that are not the big research-intensive universities with international reputations. These universities have a very unique opportunity to have deep roots with their host city. Is anyone from Boise State University here? Boise State has incredible ecology programs. It has a huge influence on local regulation, for example. With the advent of MOOCs [Massive Open Online Courses], which you didn’t mention, but was in the background of your question, absolutely universities need to demonstrate: Why us? Why here? Had I not been with Digital Science for five years, I think I would have been pessimistic about a lot of smaller universities. I am not pessimistic. I am absolutely optimistic that there is a very unique opportunity for them, but it does require selling yourself. There are tools and services out there. We can provide some services to market, but we’re a tiny player. It would behoove the universities to really sing their song loud and proud.
Institutional Obligations of Data Curation
AUDIENCE MEMBER. Adolfo Tarango, UC (University of California) San Diego. I have a question for Scott, but I think others of you might be able to address different aspects of this question as well. We have a data curation program at UC San Diego with pilot projects for various faculty. We are testing to see what they need in order to better tailor and deliver our services. The problem, if we can call it a problem, is that the word is starting to spread across the campus. What we fear is an onslaught of everybody and their uncle saying, “Here’s my data; preserve it.” I can’t imagine trying to preserve every single little datum in the universe. Long ago we stopped thinking we could collect all of the published data out there, let alone every single little hard drive that’s out there. To what extent do federal mandates require us to collect this data? “If you libraries decided to do this, now do it.” I’m just really afraid of the onslaught. What obligates us to do this when realistically it’s unsustainable?
T. SCOTT PLUTCHAK. I did say something here in my talk about how this is an insoluble problem. [Audience laughter.] I am also reminded when people have these sorts of discussions, they say, “But that’s a good problem.” Right. What the federal mandates are requiring is that grantees have a data management plan. They obligate the institution, since it’s the institution that actually gets the money, to be able to have a data management plan that will adhere to some as yet vague and unspecified guidelines. But from what we’ve seen in looking at NSF [National Science Foundation], for example, it’s going to be things like they’re going to have to describe what data it is they are collecting, they’re going to have to describe where that data is going to be stored, roughly how it is going to be managed, how it might be shared. None of that obligates the library to be the be-all, end-all of managing. I think what we need to do in this era of limited resources is really look at what your institutional priorities are. What are the key research components? For example, as I say, at UAB [University of Alabama at Birmingham] the NIH [National Institutes of Health] stuff is going to be really important. The people I need to be most concerned about are the people who are starting to bring in fairly large NIH grants. So those are the folks that I need to reach out to and see, “Do you feel like you’ve got this under control? Are there things that you need?” So I think it’s trying to focus your efforts to the extent that you can on those areas that are going to be very high priority for your institution. Then doing the thing that librarians hate to do, which is saying no to the people who come up and say, “We would love to have you help manage our data.” You have to be tough enough with it to say we’ve got these committed resources. This is where it’s focused right now. We will give you what help we can, but it’s limited, and by the way you need to have a conversation with my friend the provost [audience laughter] about the importance of your data to the success of our institution.”
Regulatory Review When Two Publishers Merge
BOB BOISSY. I just have a tiny question that maybe Peter or Mike can take. It doesn’t actually relate at all to where I work. What actually happens during regulatory review when two publishers merge? What do they do? [Audience laughter.]
MICHAEL REMINGTON. They hire antitrust lawyers. [Audience laughter.] That’s about the depth of my knowledge.
PETER JASZI. The concerns are about the preservation of the competitive environment. That exhausts pretty much what I know. [Audience laughter.]
MICHAEL REMINGTON. You can approach the agencies if one has concerns, and the FTC [Federal Trade Commission], but if it’s done by specialists, it will be done thoughtfully.
The Responsibility for Digital Preservation
AUDIENCE MEMBER. Hello… from Columbia University. My question is to all of you this afternoon. Can you talk a little bit about how you see libraries, publishers, spenders, the actual community working together to tackle the issue of digital preservation? Do you see libraries as the central hub of these activities or perhaps more towards third parties such as Portico and those types of agencies?
JAYNE MARKS. I’ll start, because I can tell you what we do. We use Portico and CLOCKSS [Controlled Lots of Copies Keep Stuff Safe]. We work with both because not all libraries are a participant or member of both organizations. What we find is that it is the most efficient way to do it. We store everything in one place once. Every library can then access it should the occasion arise. If every single library has to take responsibility for all of their own archiving, the cost would radically go up. It would be harder to keep that total volume of knowledge absolutely accurate and up-to-date. Can you imagine if a retraction comes along maybe the year after your subscription has lapsed? How then do you know where to go back to add an erratum or a retraction notice to a paper? Whereas if we can do it in one trusted repository or two, at least then the libraries know that’s the absolute up-to-date most accurate version should anything happen if the publisher isn’t around to supply the archive.
PETER JASZI. My sense is that libraries are taking and are likely to continue to take the lead with respect to the active digitization of unique materials, special collections, and other equivalent holdings. We don’t yet have a business model other than the HathiTrust model, which is not an inconsiderable one, to spread costs for more extensive forms of collection digitization across the library sector.Footnote4
T. SCOTT PLUTCHAK. I’ll just add the note since Rita and I were talking about preservation of data over lunch. Again, as I said earlier, that when you start to look at the scope of this stuff, as difficult as publications are, publications are easy compared to dealing with data. But I think this again is a real area of opportunity for collaboration on the different components because publishers, libraries, institutions, funders, etc. none of these are going to be able to figure out how to really effectively preserve digital data over the centuries with a single solution. We really have to think about what are the particular needs that these different components have and what is it that each of us can contribute in order to come up with developing solutions over time. It’s going to take some time. Part of the concern that Rita and I were talking about is the sort-of front-end problems are consuming all of our attention: What is the data? How do we try to shape it? How do we think about metadata? How do we link it up to publications? Nobody is really thinking very systematically about what happens once we address those front-end problems, then how do we make sure that when somebody goes to access a digital article twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years from now and clicks on a link to look at the original data, that the original data, wherever it happens to be, pops up in a way that is useable.
Harmonization of International Laws on Interlibrary Loan, Copyright, and Patents
BOB BOISSY. What is your sense of the status of international interlibrary loan at the moment? Is it variable? Is it going in a direction? Is everybody angry about it? [Pause.] Nope; nobody wants that question. [Audience laughter].
T. SCOTT PLUTCHAK. This is one of the ways in which the timing for me to move out of running a library is just so … [audience laughter]. We’re just kind-of starting to do this. Is this something we need to worry about?
PETER JASZI. Not being a librarian, I won’t make any statement about the actual condition, but there is, I think, a structural legal problem which interferes with any stable or general solution to the problem. It is the lack of consistency among the laws of nations around the question of copyright limitations and exceptions. In other words, every country or group of countries has its own way in doing these things. Although they are on the broadest level more or less consistent in their objectives, they are radically different in their means to accomplish those objectives. As long as you have different institutions in different countries that have objectively different legal standards respecting the issue of domestic interlibrary loan, it is really hard to imagine how we would achieve any international consensus. This leads to an interesting question, and that is whether there is any possibility to improve or increase a harmonization of international laws on limitations and exceptions. We’ve had a great deal of success in the last thirty-five years or so with achieving a certain level of compartmentalization between international laws where affirmative protections under copyright are preserved. The Marrakesh Treaty, which is a baby step, is literally the first international treaty to address requirements set up for minimum standard national laws where impact-type exceptions to copyright are concerned.Footnote5 There is, as many of you know, a pending proposal for another international treaty that would follow in the footsteps of Marrakesh, even though it would leave footprints, and that is a library treaty. Different people have different views about the likelihood that WIPO [World Intellectual Property Organization] will come to a conclusion on international treaties setting minimal standards for library exceptions in national laws. Right now, that looks like the only vehicle that is going to have the potential to accommodate that kind of harmonization. In return, without that harmonization my guess is that Americans won’t see much additional clarity around international laws. I am not advocating it, but simply describing it as a potential solution to that particular problem and others, too.
MICHAEL REMINGTON. Is there anybody here from the University of Wisconsin? [Pause. No response.] Well, then, I can speak for the Universities [audience laughter]. I represent the Tech Transfer Office of the University and we’ve been working on an issue for three or four years, because you have patent issues, too, as an overlay to copyright. We have harmonized our law in a direction that is somewhat amicable to publish or perish on the campuses to join the Europeans, who are very secretive and they have something called prior user rights, which says keep knowledge secret, and then they don’t have a grace period. We’ve always had a one-year grace period so that university professors can publish; they are expected to publish. Congress screwed this one up so that about half our grace period is gone, and on college campuses we are telling professors don’t publish before you go to your tech transfer office. This can be rather harrowing. This could be a publication that is in the final stages of publication at a science journal. We had a session at the university with 500 researchers, and we told them, well, publish, which is sort of right. I would ask the audience if this issue has resonated. The other thing that we are doing is we’re asking foreign countries to adopt our system. We actually asked Korea in the U.S.–Korea Free Trade Agreement to adopt the grace period, which we no longer have. So, the poor Koreans have a grace period that they really probably didn’t want, and we don’t have. They also adopted fair use.Footnote6 I was in Korea recently, and a number of people came up and asked what we should do on fair use? I know my answer on that one, “Talk to Professor Jaszi.” [Audience laughter.]
Best Practices and Collaboration in International Publishing
AUDIENCE MEMBER. October Ivins again. I’ve been giving some thought to your calls for best practices in the publishing community for peer review. It puts me in mind of an unsuccessful exploration that the SSP Organizational Collaboration Committee undertook a few years ago when it came to us from many SSP members that they were struggling with this increase in international publishing issues by researchers who were not native English speakers, and more significantly have very different cultural norms or social norms in research and publication. Things that we would call flat-out plagiarism they would not recognize. We invested a fair amount of time in looking at creating guidelines and training for a distance education program where we could promulgate SSP values. What we came up against on the one side is that there are all these new companies who do that as a business. Is it appropriate for our nonprofit organization to compete with them? Another thing we came up against, are smaller members in our society saying, “I would love to go to X country and deliver a talk on SSP values, but it would have to be in the context for recruiting people as authors for my publications. I would not want to recruit authors that would go to Jayne’s publication or to Caitlin’s publication.” Those publishers have their own outreach programs or work with these commercial companies. Where I’m going with that, I’m not sure, but it’s something about best practices—where we call it plagiarism and you don’t. The norms are different. As we get more international, that affects all of us. What’s the best way to do this?
JAYNE MARKS. We actually work regularly with Wiley. I don’t know if anyone has heard of the World Association of Medical Editors.Footnote7 They have some very good online resources to support editors in wide-ranging countries, not just, for example, Asia-Pacific or China. They are available to anybody who needs guidance on how to do peer review. In many cases you will get a society or maybe a government institution in, say, Nigeria, who will say we need a journal on X so they tap someone on the shoulder, “You can be the editor.” The editor then asks, “What am I supposed to do?” It’s not that they are doing anything wrong; they just don’t know what to do. That is why I think some of the Wiley materials are very helpful. Hopefully they are very helpful for editors. In terms of training and outreach you can’t do too much. We should support anybody willing to go to countries and help spread the message. We work with companies that are out there in the field; I know a number of the larger publishing companies are out there. Many of the large academic societies have their own outreach programs and they fund their editors to do work with societies from around different countries to improve the way that people work. The other thing that we have done is start to embed some of the best practice guidelines into the submission process, in particular for Open Access publications. As they are submitting, it takes them through a number of key questions that they have to answer: How did you comply with this ethical policy? How do I do this? How do I do that? If they can’t figure it out, the chances are they don’t understand. There are lots of different ways to tackle it. I don’t think you can do too much.
University Rewards System and Changing Incentives
AUDIENCE MEMBER. About twenty years ago, NASIG and SSP had another joint event. At that particular event, the provost from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champagne stood up and looked out at his audience of publishers and librarians and said, “It’s lovely that you all want to reform scholarly communication, but that’s not going to happen until the reward systems within the university structure changes.” So my question to the panel at large is: Do we see such a shift happening in the context of shrinking resources, in terms of funding that changes how we expect people to publish? Has this finally come to pass?
T. SCOTT PLUTCHAK. I think that there are some glimmers. There was the group that got together awhile back and did their manifesto against the overreliance on impact factor. I think that was very significant. An increasing interest in altmetrics, and whether you buy into any of the current alternative metrics, the notion that we are seriously looking at other ways to measure impact is a useful move. I know at my institution there is advocacy at administrative levels much toward interest in looking more broadly at how you do evaluation, things like what Symplectic does.Footnote8 Some of those resources are designed to try to give better and broader tools. How long it is going to take to really permeate throughout higher education, I don’t know. But I certainly see a lot of elements, and particularly ones that are being embraced by a newer generation of scholars that seem to be moving in the right direction.
CAITLIN TRASANDE. I get invited to give talks at post-doc associations a lot. The post-docs are interested in careers outside of the bench. One of the consistent motivations for hosting researchers who are outside of the bench is to have an impact on the world. These researchers are thinking, “I don’t want to just study a subunit of a protein for the next twenty years. I look outside my window and I see a lot of dire problems, and I want to do something about them—use my brain and my talent, and my energy to address them.” I think that to get to your point about changing incentives within the university, I do think there are glimmers. For example, you see more professors of practice now at major research universities, a different kind of academic not necessarily devoted to theory, scholarship, and basic research, but applied. As alluded to, altmetrics have become more mainstream. Apart from altmetrics there is also a general desire to have a broader measure of what the impact of scholarship is. Impact may mean saved lives if you are thinking about public health. I would draw your attention to efforts like Chris Murray’s work on DALYs, disability adjusted life years, and the whole measuring of the burden of disease. The Lancet has been an amazing leader in publishing these papers.Footnote9 That is a different kind of incentive for young graduate students to be motivated to devote their talents and efforts to. I think we’re seeing different incentives, and I think it’s a combination of publisher initiatives and measuring impact and then just sheer youthful will from this new generation of digital natives that want to make a difference in the world.
T. SCOTT PLUTCHAK. We as a community have spent just over 300 years developing the scholarly communication system that reached its maturity in the print world in the second half of the twentieth century. We have now been trying to reform it using these new technological tools for maybe thirty years. It’s a long process, and patience is a virtue.
Bob Boissy ended the session by thanking all of the speakers for their time and energy, and hoping that everyone had a great day.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Bob Boissy
Bob Boissy is Manager, Account Development & Strategic Alliances, Springer.
Jayne Marks
Jayne Marks is Vice President of Global Publishing, LWW Journals, Wolters Kluwer.
T. Scott Plutchak
T. Scott Plutchak is Director of Digital Data Curation Strategies, The University of Alabama at Birmingham.
Caitlin Trasande
Caitlin Trasande is Head of Research Policy, Digital Science.
Peter Jaszi
Peter Jaszi is Professor of Law, Faculty Director of the Glushko-Amuelson Intellectual Property Clinic, Washington College of Law, American University.
Michael Remington
Michael Remington is Partner, Drinker Biddle and Reath LLP.
Kay G. Johnson
Kay G. Johnson is Head of Collection and Technical Services, McConnell Library, Radford University.
Notes
1 Holly Marshall, Best Practices. With contributions from Amy Wrynn (New York: American Society of Picture Professionals, c2011). Updated August 6, 2013, http://aspp.com/news/best-practices/ (accessed August 5, 2015).
2 US. 110th Congress. S.2913, “Shawn Bentley Orphan Works Act of 2008,” passed Senate amended 26 September 2008, https://www.congress.gov/bill/110th-congress/senate-bill/2913 (accessed August 5, 2015).
3 The City University of New York. “About: The Nation’s Leading Public Urban University,” http://www.cuny.edu/about.html (accessed October 22, 2015)
4 HathiTrust Digital Library, https://www.hathitrust.org/ (accessed August 5, 2015).
5 World Intellectual Property Organization. “Marrakesh Treaty to Facilitate Access to Published Works for Persons Who Are Blind, Visually Impaired, or Otherwise Print Disabled,” 31 July 2013, http://www.wipo.int/meetings/en/doc_details.jsp?doc_id=245323 (accessed August 5, 2015)
6 KORUS FTA, “Intellectual Property Rights: KORUS FTA Text.” U.S. Korea Connect, http://www.uskoreaconnect.org/about/korus/intellectual-property-rights.html (accessed August 5 2015).
7 WAME: World Association of Medical Editors, http://www.wame.org/ (accessed August 5 2015).
8 “Elements,” Symplectic, http://symplectic.co.uk/products/elements/ (accessed August 5 2015).
9 Christopher L. Murray et al., “Disability-Adjusted Life Years (DALYs) for 291 Diseases and Injuries in 21 Regions, 1990–2010: A Systematic Analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2010.” The Lancet 380, no. 9859 (2012/2013):2197–2223. http://www.centerforda.com/publications/16%20*-%20Murray%20-%20DALY.pdf (accessed August 5, 2015).