ABSTRACT
All across the United States universities are being called into critical conversations about social justice. The American Library Association Code of Ethics calls on librarians to “uphold the principles of intellectual freedom” and “distinguish between our personal convictions and professional duties.” Our ethics shape our engagement in these critical conversations. This article presents two ethical dilemmas experienced in Open Access electronic resource collection development and acquisition. Discussed first is the discovery and remediation of sharp practice in article processing charges. Second is the challenge of commercial Open Access projects and the role of libraries as investors of production. The author discusses how library professional ethics are applicable to and stretched by the goals of Open Access.
As Open Access (OA) moves from theory to proof, library collection policies and budgets are being directed toward OA initiatives, particularly commercial initiatives.Footnote1 In 2013, Sharon Dyas-Correia and Rea Devakos at the University of Toronto examined how collection development officers saw collection development policies changing since the conceptualization of OA.Footnote2 Collection development officers who responded found OA to be an important goal for libraries. However, the majority of respondents, 66.7%, said a collection development policy “should include just an overall general statement” regarding OA.Footnote3 In the survey comments provided to the researchers two themes arose that directly relate to my experience with OA acquisitions. First, “Some collection development heads felt that policies should be agnostic, and silent in terms of business model.”Footnote4 The agnostic business model theme creates ethical challenges around campus OA author funds, as will be explained later. Second, respondents saw OA as another format and spoke to cataloging concerns, or lack of additional funds to collect the emerging format. The ethical challenges of seeing OA projects as a pre-published format to ingest into existing policies and workflows will also be presented.
Ethical challenges to agnostic business models in the wake of OA
The Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) says, “The fundamental goal of an open-access fund is to support publication models that enable free, immediate, online distribution of, and access to, scholarly research.”Footnote5 Concurring with this statement, Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) opened our Open Access Article Processing Charges (APC) fund in the fall of 2016. We were unprepared to find a pay to publish system that had developed aggressive and undisclosed fee collection practices that targeted authors. Each publisher had its own confusing requirements, such as less than 30-day payment terms or extra charges for non-preferred payment methods. Authors were contacted frequently, usually weekly, for payment even after the publisher knew the institution was handling payment for the author. That first year was spent counseling authors who feared that their work would not be published and advocating on their behalf to publishers. Counseling authors revealed that some publishers’ websites lacked complete information about their unique APC payment requirements. Authors selecting which OA journal to publish in could not have gained a full understanding about how the business transaction would proceed based on publically available information.
Conversely, all publisher websites investigated were consistently clear regarding the responsibility of APC payments as resting with the author regardless of institutional or funder resources available. The consistent message that payment is the responsibility of the author contradicts the supportive message of OA champions. Indeed, SPARC EUROPE stated in 2013 regarding OA journals in the humanities, “It is important to remember that the payment of APCs is intended to be routed through your institution and so you should contact your librarian for advice on the funds available.”Footnote6 In some cases at VCU, publishers obligated authors to fees due within seven days and their methods of payment to a single preferred method. If publishers agreed that institutions bear the burden of APC payments as SPARC Europe claims, then publisher payment terms and methods would be standard and aligned with their current payment collection practices with institutional customers.
As the VCU author fund continued, liaison librarians and other OA champions were informed about the APC practices and encouraged to offer advocacy services. The American Library Association (ALA) Code of Ethics statement five says, “We treat co-workers and other colleagues with respect, fairness, and good faith, and advocate conditions of employment that safeguard the rights and welfare of all employees of our institutions.”Footnote7 The consumer market created by publishers for APCs violates the rights and welfare of co-workers at our institutions. David Shulenburger, writing on behalf of the Association of Research Libraries, critiqued the APC consumer market in 2016, stating that “all buying power (market power) is taken from the employers of authors and authors, who have no market power, effectively become the buyers.”Footnote8 The APC collections practices experienced at VCU through the author fund have shown the operationalization of the market power between publisher and author. To remain business model agnostic, as some collection development officers indicated in the Dyas-Correia and Devakos survey, is a privileged position backed by institutional buying power. Shulenburger continues, “Projections made from the world in which monopoly-oligopsony characterizes the sides of the market with a limited amount of buying done through the APC route, simply become irrelevant to a monopoly-competitive world in which publishers with market power confront individual authors.”Footnote9 My experience as an acquisitions librarian enables me to recognize when APC collections behavior is aggressive. It is the responsibility of every acquisitions librarian as found in statement seven of the Acquisition Section of the Association for Library Collections and Technical Services (ALCTS)’s Statements on Principles and Standards of Acquisition Practice, to “foster and promote fair, ethical and legal trade and business practices.”Footnote10 In keeping with this statement and the ALA Guide to Ethics statement five, as libraries engage in experimental models of collection development with OA librarians should not remain agnostic on the business model and address ethical concerns of fairness and good faith.
Ethical challenges of xenophobic OA collections
While the prior example is a call from professional ethics to confront unfair OA business models, the next example relays how an OA distribution model challenged my understanding of professional ethics. Reveal Digital is a company that creates digital collections of 20th-century history. VCU Libraries assertively funded OA initiatives during this period including Reveal Digital’s prior primary source collection. As a known supporter of OA projects, Reveal Digital approached the library about financially backing their developing project, Hate in America: The Newspapers of the KKK. The project digitizes the newspapers of the Ku Klux Klan [KKK] Inc. and KKK sympathizers of the 1920s.Footnote11 To fund this project, Reveal Digital seeks libraries as producers, seed money investors in the most traditional media sense. I was asked to add VCU as a producer of the project in the fall of 2017. This contribution request came at a time of local discussions about Confederate monument removal, specifically along Monument Avenue in Richmond, Virginia, where VCU is located. How did it benefit the university to engage in the conversation of contextualizing or removing revisionist monuments in public spaces, erected in the same era as this primary source material, but become an investing producer in the open web distribution of revisionist ideas?Footnote12 Although the request to invest did not originate from faculty, the KKK Newspapers database would support the research of a faculty member. This faculty member could benefit now from the growing live collection as it is digitized, should VCU become a producer, or later when the project would be completed in 2020. Was this purchase “giving first consideration to the objectives and policies of [the] institution?”Footnote13
To address these questions, I read the Guide to Ethics in Acquisitions published in 2014. The Guide is built from the ALA Code of Ethics, ALA–ALCTS–Acquisitions Statements on Principles and Standards of Acquisition Practice, and the ALA Bill of Rights. The Guide states that when it comes to scope of content censorship must be avoided.Footnote14 Indeed, it is the mission of a research library to collect an abundance of speech for the research collection. I struggled with this because I found no consideration for how being a producer, what Reveal Digital calls a “participating library,” of a xenophobic newspaper database published to the open web and ingestible in commercial search engines was different from adding published xenophobic content to the library’s collection. Becoming an OA media producer in partnership with Reveal Digital means that parts of the collection will advance beyond the physical bookshelf or virtual authentication wall and beyond the abundance of speech curated for the research mission of the institution.
As I struggled with the imbalance of reach between open source and licensed content distribution models the Guide was explicit “if these [professional] ethics are not recognized or followed by the members of the occupation, then both the ethical standards and the occupation could be at risk of failing and of breaking the public trust…. If the profession fails to develop and maintain its ethical standards, librarianship will fail because society will lose confidence in the profession.”Footnote15 The weight of my ethical tension could not have been greater. The Guide states that censorship happens when “one ideology is not seen as significant as the opposing viewpoint.”Footnote16 However, I did not question the contents’ significance. I struggled with advancing one ideology outside of the libraries’ collection to the open web despite the remainder of the collection blocked from presence in the same digital space. Untethered from the full collection, Reveal Digital and The Hate in America: Newspapers of the KKK database would be responsible for communicating its intent and the intent of its participating libraries to commercial search engine users.
Considering OA initiatives as a new format for collection can result in limited evaluation tools. Indeed, VCU’s collection development policy states under collection formats, “Open access publications are a key focus of collecting, and critical for scholarly communication and the future of education. Accordingly, collection librarians choose Open Access publications whenever available and appropriate to support a discipline.”Footnote17 Dyas-Correia and Devakos found very few comprehensive collection development policies about OA.Footnote18 A comprehensive collection development policy regarding OA initiatives can incorporate concepts of information literacy to aid librarians in evaluating OA commercial projects to green light. The University of North Texas’ Collection Development Policy for Open Access and Born-Digital Resources is one example.Footnote19
With the community discussions around revisionist history concurrent with this OA database venture funding request, compounded with silence regarding the inherent imbalance of distribution models in the acquisitions ethical statements, I decided to use information literacy concepts to examine the Reveal Digital database hoping to be a professional aligned with the ALA–ALCTS Standards once again. Unfortunately, in my review of the database, not its content but the database as the project of investment, I again found significant weakness. Reveal Digital’s lean startup model for this project has resulted in feeble editorial management. The prospectus shows no budget for editorial contributors from fields such as such as media history, hate speech studies, or critical race theory, to help contextualize the collection of newspapers. The only explanation for “Why the KKK Newspapers” is a direct quote from a single historian.Footnote20 Clare Horrocks, a scholar of 19th-century print newspapers and contributor to the Punch Historical Archive, states collaboration between publishers, scholars, librarians, and students is essential to the creation of newspaper archives.Footnote21 She describes in her article several newspaper projects both open and subscription based that were more successful when scholars informed the creation of the digital collection for research and classroom use. In describing their intentions for this primary source database, Reveal Digital states that the content of this database will help people “understand today’s version of populism, American nationalism, and the Alt-right.”Footnote22 How could a media history scholar elucidate why the collection of KKK newspapers can be described as “a slick and successful recruiting and marketing engine?” Invited into the editorial process, how would a critical race theory scholar have drawn attention to the use of American as a substitution for White across the text of the database landing page? No mention of racial minorities can be found on the landing page except for within the newspaper images that rotate on the page. The word ethnic is used once. The word Catholic is used four times. American appears 24 times. There is no mention of xenophobia. Racism is mentioned once. Delegation to one voice to explain why the collection is needed is not a scholarly conversation. There is a further reading list of citations, but there are no abstracts and some of the links to open resources are dead. Although the content in the database is described as American many times, there is no reference to ethnic or racial minority, or Catholic newspapers, although some tracked and reported on the KKK in that time period. There is no reference to other OA newspaper archives of the period that a researcher could use to compare the xenophobic press to mainstream American press. The lack of editorial point of view has made the project all the more troublesome.
In addition to limited and delegated authority, the marketing language of the prospectus was copied to the landing page of the research database. Claims of KKK impact, like the number of members at its peak or that its national newspaper had a “circulation larger than the New York Times” stretch the appearance of objectivity. This culminates in the exaggerated statement that the database “also includes the voices from several anti-Klan newspapers.” There are two anti-Klan papers in this database. To be fair, the project has identified an additional three anti-Klan titles but has not digitized them. The live version of the database does not contain several anti-Klan titles. Reveal Digital is incorrectly implying an attempt toward comprehensiveness of speech regarding the KKK.
The overselling statement about “several anti-Klan newspapers” elucidates the problem of considering OA initiatives another published format to be incorporated into existing library collection practices and workflows. Existing practice for description of databases in catalogs or A–Z pages often involves transcribing from the database’s entry page. The entry page of this database copies from a venture capital prospectus and is not objective. Unfortunately, a Google search reveals that libraries have continued the transcribing practice of our conventional workflow and over 100 libraries have included the reference to “several anti-Klan newspapers” in their local description of the database.Footnote23 Moreover, while the landing page glosses over the Klan of this era through American essentialization, omission of ethnicities, and upselling, some library websites have chosen to assign local categories such as African American Studies, African Studies, African Diaspora, and Library of Congress Subject Headings such as “African Americans – Social conditions – 20th century – Newspapers – Databases.” Reveal Digital makes no statements that this database is about or concerning African Americans. Librarians are responsible for the association of African Americans to this database of xenophobic resources. The poor contextualization of the database and our professional inherent biases echo unchallenged across the .edu extension of the Internet.
Although I have performed this examination, nothing in the ALA Code of Ethics or the ALA–ALCTS–Acquisitions Statements on Principles and Standards of Acquisition Practice authorizes this critical approach to my participation. Statement ten says an acquisitions librarian “strives continuously for knowledge of the publishing and bookselling industry.”Footnote24 OA publishing and conventional publishing present vastly different participation obligations on behalf of libraries. Yet the suggested application of an acquisitions librarian’s knowledge is narrow and driven by collection development policies that can be general or even silent regarding OA. Chapter 3 of the Guide to Ethics in Acquisitions clearly states that the scope of content, and I would add to that scope of context, cannot be a purchasing decision point.
My recommendation from working through these ethical dilemmas is to address the nuances of OA in our professional ethical standards and collection development policies. Librarians should intentionally examine the benefit and harm we may be creating for co-workers through subvention of a consumer article processing charges marketplace. Collection development officers should wrestle with the fundamental questions of the OA distribution model and not lean on general endorsement statements. All practice should be revisited to incorporate OA projects and their inherent differences to conventionally published content. One practical change I made is to inquire with all conventional commercial publishers of primary source collections what they need contractually and financially to turn their licensed collections OA. All parties must invite examination of our biases in theorizing who the public is and how they benefit from OA initiatives. SPARC describes OA as the information distribution answer to “the open system for communicating research results in which anyone, anywhere can contribute.”Footnote25 All members of the profession must contribute to OA development and maturation in order for our professional ethics to hold the public trust.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Amanda Echterling
Amanda Echterling is Head of Licensing and Acquisitions, Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA.
Notes
1. “Code of Ethics,” American Library Association, amended January 22, 2008, http://www.ala.org/tools/ethics (accessed June 1, 2018).
2. Sharon Dyas-Correia and Rea Devakos, “Open Access and Collection Development Policies: Two Solitudes?” (paper presented at the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions World Library and Information Conference, Lyon, France, August 16–22, 2014), http://library.ifla.org/id/eprint/839 (accessed June 1, 2018).
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. “Campus Open Access Funds,” SPARC, https://sparcopen.org/our-work/oa-funds/ (accessed June 1, 2018).
6. “Open Access for the Humanities,” SPARC Europe, 2013, https://sparceurope.org/download/2378/ (accessed June 1, 2018).
7. “Code of Ethics,” American Library Association, amended January 22, 2008, http://www.ala.org/tools/ethics (accessed June 1, 2018).
8. David Shulenburger, “Substituting Article Processing Charges for Subscriptions: The Cure Is Worse than the Disease,” Association of Research Libraries, https://www.arl.org/storage/documents/substituting-apcs-for-subscriptions-20july2016.pdf (accessed June 1, 2018).
9. Ibid.
10. Wyoma vanDuinkerken, Wendi Arant Kaspar, and Jeanne Harrell, “Guide to Ethics in Acquisitions” (ALCTS Acquisitions Guides Series, no. 17, ALCTS Publishing, Chicago, IL, 2014), 25.
11. “Newspapers from the Rise and Fall of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1920s: A Diversity & Dissent Digitization Fund Project,” Reveal Digital, http://revealdigital.com/kkk-newspapers/ (accessed June 1, 2018).
12. Brian McNeill, “VCU, UR Students Confront Question: ‘What Would a Truthful Representation of Richmond’s History Look Like?” VCU News, April 7, 2017, https://www.news.vcu.edu/article/VCU_UR_students_confront_question_What_would_a_truthful_representation (accessed June 1, 2018); “VCUarts Leads Initiative to Reimagine Richmond’s Historic Monument Avenue,” VCUarts, June 29, 2017, https://arts.vcu.edu/vcuarts-leads-initiative-reimagine-richmonds-historic-monument-avenue/(accessed June 1, 2018); Brian McNeill, “VCU History Education Professor: How Confederate Monuments and the ‘Lost Cause’ Narrative Distort our Understanding of the Civil War,” VCU News, October 3, 2017, https://www.news.vcu.edu/article/VCU_history_education_professor_How_Confederate_monuments_and (accessed June 1, 2018).
13. vanDuinkerken, Kaspar, and Harrell, “Guide to Ethics in Acquisitions,” 22.
14. Ibid.
15. Ibid.
16. Ibid.
17. “Collection Formats,” Guidelines for Collections, Virginia Commonwealth University Libraries, https://www.library.vcu.edu/media/vculibrary/documents/collections/GuidelinesforCollections.pdf (accessed June 1, 2018).
18. Dyas-Correia and Devakos, “Open Access and Collection Development Policies,” 7.
19. “Collection Development Policy for Open Access and Born-Digital Resources,” University of North Texas Libraries, http://www.library.unt.edu/policies/collection-development/oa-collection-development-policy (accessed June 1, 2018).
20. “Why KKK Newspapers?” KKK Newspapers, Reveal Digital, https://kkknews.revealdigital.com/ (accessed June 1, 2018).
21. Clare Horrocks, “Nineteenth-Century Journalism Online—The Market Versus Academia?” Media History 20, no.1 (January 2014): 21–33. https://doi.org/10.1080/13688804.2013.873159.
22. “Introduction,” KKK Newspapers, Reveal Digital, https://kkknews.revealdigital.com/ (accessed June 1, 2018).
23. Google search, performed June 1, 2018, https://www.google.com/search?q=%22several+anti-klan+newspapers%22+site:.edu.
24. vanDuinkerken, Kaspar and Harrell, “Guide to Ethics in Acquisitions,” 29.
25. “Open Access,” SPARC, https://sparcopen.org/open-access/ (accessed June 1, 2018).