Britain decides to emulate USian University Epic Fail

Eagleton on a new, private university in London:

If a system of US-type private liberal arts colleges like this one gains ground in Britain, the result will be to relegate an already impoverished state university system to second-class status. So far, British society has held the view that the education of doctors, teachers, social workers and so on is too momentous a matter to be left to the vagaries of the profit motive. This is why though there are already one or two private universities in the country, nobody has a clue where they are. This new college, however, could be the thin end of an ugly wedge. Why should Grayling, Dawkins and their chums care about that, though, when they will be drawing down mega-salaries for what is reported to be an extremely modest amount of lecturing?

In the US, getting yourself a decent education depends in part on the whims of the well-heeled. It is they who decide whether to obtain their tax breaks by donating a new theatre or lab to your college, or whether to find some more devious way of avoiding the inland revenue. This new venture in Bloomsbury is said to be backed by multimillion pound funding from private investors. While the Graylings and Colleys spout on in the classrooms about humane values, they are in the pay of those who would not recognise such things if they were to move into their living rooms.

Jouissance de JSTOR

I think what I find most hilarious in the JSTOR project is the mutually assured destruction at the base of both its mission and its business model.

• If the mission is to preserve and perpetuate the archives of human understanding in the form of scholarly journals,
• And the business model is to preserve and perpetuate monies due upon accessing aforesaid scholarly journals,

Then to present us with pages like this is to manage at one and the same time to ensure that

1. no transmission of human knowledge occurs, and that
2. the possibility of even buying said knowledge is put out of reach of all but those who belong to a payor institutional subscriber.

Bottom line: Mr. Vettori's review of Mr. Hollander's $55 book about a single letter allegedly by Dante Alighieri remains a closed book. Ignorance, except for a happy very few, is assured; no money changes hands. Just one more blissful adventure in the psychosis of capital blindness.

Happy Labor Day, JSTOR.

Bleeding the way

From HOT TYPE

The Need for a Broader Concept of Publishing in the Digital Age

By JENNIFER HOWARD

LEADING THE WAY: Publishing research is more critical than ever to a university's mission, but too many institutions fail to recognize and support it adequately, even as their presses struggle to find their footing in a fast-changing online world.

That's the message driven home by a report called "University Publishing in a Digital Age," released last week by Ithaka, a nonprofit group that promotes the use of information technology in higher education.

"A broader concept of publishing" apparently begins by winnowing the cheapskates.

JSTOR: Two clarifications

After my last conversation with Bruce Heterick of JSTOR, I had a few more questions, but our schedules didn't match up. I appreciate his making time via email to offer a couple of clarifications, address three follow-up questions, and share pointers for help with a fourth.

Heterick said my account of our talk was "fair and accurate," with two exceptions, one major, one minor:

Exception #1:

Heterick: "The minor exception has to do with your characterization of “pay-per-view” via JSTOR" [quoting from my post]:

JSTOR hadn't thought of offering a pay-per-view access before Google crawled its archive. Now, as of January, JSTOR has invited its publishers to make their titles available to unaffiliated researchers on a pay-per-view basis. Only about 150 titles are currently available, and the pricing is entirely at the publisher's discretion - which is not necessarily within most readers' reach (I've heard various prices per article: $35, $60 -- who do they think they are, the New York Times #

"Certainly, in the whole of the pay-per-view world, there are some article prices that approach the prices that you’ve referenced in your post. In JSTOR’s Publisher Sales Service, however, the average price per article is about $14, with the majority of articles available in the $4-$10 range. Perhaps those averages will move (up or down) as more participating publishers decide to offer individual article purchases via JSTOR, but that’s the data we have at the moment. The service has been popular in the brief time it has been available (I think something like 6,500 articles have been purchased thus far), so some folks are finding it helpful."

Comment: Fourteen dollars for a superannuated scholarly article - or even a brand new one - seems excessive. The internet holds multitudes, and lends itself to micropayments. E.g.: Let's say a library pays $10,000 for a year's subscription to a substantial collection of old journals -- perhaps a few million pages worth. Let's say two million pages, though it could well be more. That comes to $.0005 per page. And that gives hundreds, or thousands, of students and professors unlimited access to the journals. So, why not offer a pay-per-view model that charges individuals $.0005 per page? Granted, single downloads would not add up to much, but over time, as people became aware of the quality, scope and depth of the scholarship, volume would build. I'm not aware that JSTOR would be risking anything here, since its current subscription model would still be intact - there would just be more revenue, to allocate however it might choose. A win-win. (Update: Micro is the new macro)

Exception #2:

Heterick: "The major exception has to do with the discussion around 'open access':"

JSTOR is looking at other ways to not simply emulate Kafka. In fact, says Heterick, it once did explore an individual access model, but ran into "difficulties" -- still, the goal of open access is very much on its mind.

“It’s not a question of if we should do it but when we can do it and not devolve our preservation goals,” he says. “Would people or libraries be willing to pay to maintain JSTOR and maintain its long term mission of archiving? We don’t know… .”

Would institutional libraries continue to pay the subscription fees if the journals were openly available to all? #

Heterick: "It isn’t really the case that JSTOR is thinking about “open access” as much as I was carrying forward the notion that JSTOR is always trying to “open access” more broadly to other communities (e.g. secondary schools, public libraries, developing nations). That is an important part of JSTOR’s mission (to extend access as broadly as possible), so perhaps I should have used the phrase “broaden access” instead of “open access” to avoid the confusion with much more highly-publicized “open access movement”(OA)."

Comment: I am now officially depressed. I might have misheard or misconstrued Heterick's remarks because I hadn't heard him say that there was a definite policy at JSTOR that would preclude exploring Open Access in the full sense of the term. Apparently JSTOR doesn't believe that knowledge, the scholarly intelligence of the humanities, belongs to us all. I believe JSTOR is wrong. Such knowledge is not the property of some university, archive, or middleman. It took a lot of generosity on the part of a lot of people contributing to a lot of nonprofit institutions to foster the facilities, time and wherewithal for serious scholarly work. To turn around and now tell us that the fruits of those long labors are the private stash of JSTOR and its publishers is to fail to see that the only reason the human race tolerates these institutions is in hopes that they will open our eyes, expand our minds, and give us a chance for a more human, liberated world. To commodify the fruits of this vinyard is to err in understanding the core value and original purpose of the humanities, and of education in general. A catastrophic failure of intelligence.

I'll save Bruce's responses to my follow-ups for another post.

Techné is the root of idolatry

I have colour television
Though it can't receive a thing

To say thousands of "American Idol'' fans were unhappy this week would be an understatement of the highest order. #.

the “Missing Links Golf Classic.” The Golf outing was held on Monday, April 30th at the Cardinal Club in Louisville, Kentucky. This was the 4th year for this bi-annual fundraising event for the Creation Museum put on by former PGA tour player, Ted Schulz.

We're three generations deep into being raised by television... #

A conversation with JSTOR's Bruce Heterick

I had a good conversation the other day with Bruce Heterick, Director, Library Relations, at JSTOR.

Some readers of IMproPRieTies may have noticed our recent interest in JSTOR, which mainly derived from (1) searching for certain topics in the Humanities and Social Sciences, (2) discovering with glee that interesting articles from scholarly journals are now online, (3) realizing with consternation that such articles lie behind an institutional barrier that blocks access to anyone not affiliated with a participating institution, and (4) registering puzzlement that anyone would take all sorts of pains to firewall knowledge -- knowledge mainly produced by scholars at not-for-profit institutions of higher learning devoted to bringing light into our world.

Heterick was generous with his time, and patient with my questions. The first thing to say is that the firewall was less an aim of the original design than a function of it -- i.e., they didn't create online access to valuable scholarly knowledge with the idea of enjoying being able to say "Nanni Nanni Boo Boo" to anyone lacking the requisite institutional handshake.

In fact, and here's the maybe-if-and-when good news, the presiding lights behind JSTOR are now looking at various ways and means to open its treasurehouse to all, because they understand that that makes all sorts of sense. They simply have to ensure that by doing so, they don't remove the parts of their economic model that have enabled them to build a self-sufficient, independent 501(c)3 organization in a relatively short time.

Let me back up and offer some of what Heterick shared with me about JSTOR (more background here and, in book form via here.)

The founding aim of JSTOR was less dissemination than preservation. The problem it was created to solve was the spiraling costs of library space required to house, redundantly, physical copies of hundreds of scholarly journals. William Bowen, a former president of Princeton, is credited with the idea of building a central archive that would preserve and curate complete sets of journals print editions, and become the basis for a digital archive libraries could access electronically.

The project began in 1995 with seed money from the Andrew Mellon Foundation with just a few titles, housing them in archives in California and at Harvard. Over time JSTOR has developed into an independent not-for-profit entity that currently holds some 900 titles (of which 725 or so are online, and the balance are somewhere on their way to digital existence) representing 23 million pages of content, 4 million full-length articles, spanning 47 academic disciplines. About 430 publishers participate in JSTOR currently; the strongest topic areas of the collection are in Economics and History.

The business model supporting JSTOR's evolution has worked like this: It invites publishers (primarily non-commercial, university presses) to participate, on the basis of various academic criteria. Any publisher who chooses to do so agrees that it will freely grant rights in perpetuity to all issues of the journal (1) going back to its first issue, and (2) going forward to a set time period prior to the current issue. Known as the "moving wall," this is a period anywhere from no time at all (in the case of one journal) to five years or more which the journal retains the rights, in case they have some economic value. So every year, a new year's worth of older issues automatically gets processed for and becomes part of JSTOR's permanent collection.

The publishers give their older content to JSTOR in part because they deem it to have little or no economic value. (Its epistemic value is another story.)

JSTOR scans the physical editions, and places the printed copies in its archives. The digital content is then grouped into one or more of 14 collections that JSTOR makes available to universities, research societies, government-funded agencies and other nonprofits on a subscription basis. A small research society might pay $300 annually for a narrow slice of the pie; large universities might subscribe to all the collections for several thousand dollars a year. Currently about 3,300 institutions participate, half in the US, half elsewhere, and about four-fifths of them are instititutions of higher learning.

With so much of its energy devoted to the muscle work of preservation, JSTOR has clearly prioritized its archival function. But it has along the way begun to look at the possibilities for more open access to its collections. Any qualifying institution in Africa can get access to its entire collection for free. There are special rates for high schools and an effort to get more public libraries to buy in.

Enter Google

Now, all this was taking place in the background, without much in the way of public notice, until last year, when JSTOR allowed Google to spider its online archives. Suddenly JSTOR articles began appearing high in people's google searches for all kinds of information, from Homer to Romantic Poetry to recent epistemology.

At which point, Heterick said, requests for JSTOR's online material "exploded." JSTOR found itself in the interesting position of letting it teasingly be known that it has an astonishing wealth of scholarship at the same time as it was saying to any unaffiliated researcher at its gate: "Not now."

JSTOR hadn't thought of offering a pay-per-view access before Google crawled its archive. Now, as of January, JSTOR has invited its publishers to make their titles available to unaffiliated researchers on a pay-per-view basis. Only about 150 titles are currently available, and the pricing is entirely at the publisher's discretion - which is not necessarily within most readers' reach (I've heard various prices per article: $35, $60 -- who do they think they are, the New York Times?).

JSTOR is looking at other ways to not simply emulate Kafka. In fact, says Heterick, it once did explore an individual access model, but ran into "difficulties" -- still, the goal of open access is very much on its mind.

“It’s not a question of if we should do it but when we can do it and not devolve our preservation goals,” he says. “Would people or libraries be willing to pay to maintain JSTOR and maintain its long term mission of archiving? We don’t know… .”

Would institutional libraries continue to pay the subscription fees if the journals were openly available to all? On one hand, why should they? Still, it's not impossible: after all, JSTOR is ensuring the immortality of the work of...scholars at these same universities. It's also saving the costs of continually adding space. Until recently, those running our institutions of higher learning might not have recognized that value, but, Heterick says, that seems to be changing. They now see that they can create new more attractive kinds of learning environments (Starbucks in the reading room?) instead of facing the dull chore of finding places to add stacks.

In short, it's not for a lack of a will to disseminate that so much scholarship remains behind the JSTOR firewall, and that's good news. It's a matter of finding the right economics. One possibility: instead of pay-per-view, users could pay for a slice of time -- a day, week, etc. of unlimited access.

====

I've heard from a few people who shared my interest in access to JSTOR and to other virtual closed stacks, including Project MUSE and BioOne (thanks to Frank Paynter for the latter).

Your turn: Thoughts on this? Suggestions for a more open business model? Philanthropists! Got a few million smackers to put it all right?

[Long overdue update: A follow-up to this discussion, here, contains two significant and deflating clarifications.]