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Editorial: Scholarly Communication in the Next Millennium: The Policy Agenda and Some Afterthoughts
Rowland Lorimer Simon Fraser University John H. V. Gilbert & Ruth J. Patrick
University of British Columbia
Rowland Lorimer is Editor of the Canadian Journal of Communication and a professor of Communication and Director of the Master of Publishing Program at Simon Fraser University, 515 West Hastings Street, Vancouver, BC V6B 5K3. E-mail: Rowland_Lorimer@sfu.ca John Gilbert is Co-ordinator of Health Sciences and professor of Audiology and Speech Sciences at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z3. E-mail: johnhvg@unixg.ubc.ca Ruth Patrick is currently on administrative leave from her position as University Librarian at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC V6T 1Z3. E-mail: rpatrick@unixg.ubc.ca
Abstract: This paper is a compilation of the principles, policy priorities, and actions recommended for consideration by the participants in the March 1997 Scholarly Communication in the Next Millennium (SCNM) conference. These considerations and recommendations are directed at a wide range of interested parties including universities, research-granting councils, national bodies of universities, librarians and scholars, and governments and their agencies. The paper includes a number of afterthoughts developed by the editors of this selected proceedings.
Résumé: Cet article recense les principes, politiques prioritaires et actions recommandés par les participants à la conférence de mars 1997 sur la Communication savante au prochain millénaire. Ces considérations et recommandations ont pour objectif un large éventail d'acteurs, y compris les universités, les conseils de soutien à la recherche, les organismes nationaux d'universités, de bibliothécaires et de savants, ainsi que les gouvernements et leurs agences. Cet article comprend en outre un nombre de réflections sur la conférence faites par les éditeurs des textes sélectionnés pour ce numéro.
Conference overview
The Scholarly Communication in the Next Millennium (SCNM) conference was held March 5-8, 1997, at Simon Fraser University Harbour Centre in Vancouver, BC. As the program in Appendix 1 of this volume indicates, the conference was composed of two parts -- the presentation of papers and participation in workshops designed to bring forward policy considerations. It was attended by approximately 200 people representing all the constituencies concerned with, or directly affected by, scholarly communication.
The SCNM conference was designed with two purposes. The first was to bring forward information descriptive of scholarly communication, with emphasis on scholarly journal publishing. Given that the conference had been conceived in the context of both the scientific, technical, and medical (STM) serials crisis and, to a lesser extent, a concern with the funding of Canadian Humanities and Social Science (HSS) journals, the second purpose was to bring forward policy, principles, and proposals to address pressing issues. Towards that end, the conference ended with four hours of group discussions followed by a plenary. Participants were divided into 12 groups; each group contained representatives from a variety of backgrounds. They were asked to address three fundamental questions as follows:
1. Basic Principles
What basic principles should guide the development of Canada's scholarly communications environment, both electronic and print-on-paper, over the next five to ten years?
2. Policy priorities
What priorities should Canada set in building its scholarly communications environment on these basic principles, through related policy actions and initiatives at the federal, provincial, and local levels?
3. Immediate actions -- Local and national
- (a)
- What policy-related actions and initiatives must be developed over the next five years?
- (b)
- What time lines are advisable?
- (c)
- By whom should such actions be effected?
Recommendations of the working groups
The deliberations of the 12 working groups were far-reaching. Insofar as the groups reflected various interests, the points made by each group were not necessarily consistent with each other. There was also overlap in the material brought forward to the final plenary, some of which was eliminated in the summary that follows and some of which was kept to provide a flavour of the different ways in which more than one group articulated much the same point. The submissions made by the groups to the final plenary can be summarized as follows:
Principles
General
Scholarly communication is a process, not a product, and publications are an integral part of that process. Given current economic and technological conditions, we have the opportunity to rethink scholarly communication. Such a rethinking should conceive of research as a network of activities, rather than a linear pipeline.
Scholarly communication is a sequential value-adding process. The various mediated steps in this process are essential to the quality of the process and the outcome.
The primary goal must be to create a sustainable system of scholarly communication serving individuals, organizations, and institutions.
Scholarly communication reflects political, economic, and social values and has a cultural and an ideological dimension.
Equity of access is paramount and diversity must be recognized as an essential feature.
A guiding principle for scholarly communication should be that publicly funded research should be publicly accessible beyond the research community, both to individuals and to non-research-oriented institutions.
Scholarship should be disseminated broadly and in an affordable manner -- for scholars, for the public, and for the world community.
Contrary to the apparent assumptions of the Association of Universities and CollegesCanadian Association of Research Libraries / l'Association des bibliothèques de recherche du Canada (AUCCCARL /ABRC) final task force report, The Changing World of Scholarly Communication: Challenges and Choices for Canada (1996):
- Digitization does not lead to democratization;
- Speedy communication may not be as robust as slower communication;
- Copyright ownership is not necessarily related to price;
- The value of peer review and the editorial process is significant;
- The costs and benefits of electronic communication are not well understood.
The value of peer review and its attendant editorial function is critical to scholarly publishing.
Scholarly communication must be sustainable as a public resource within the existing resource base, but optimized to create maximum benefit.
Non-proprietary, widely accepted technical standards for publication are recommended.
An accessible and affordable system for scholarly publishing is paramount, whether provided by profit or not-for-profit entities.
Three levels of scholarly communication require recognition: an informal level of dialogue and correspondence, a middle level of initial presentation to peers, and a final, value-added level of peer-reviewed material that constitutes the permanent record. New communications technology facilitates communication, especially at the lower levels, but, in itself, does not provide solutions to any current problems.
The foundation of scholarly communications is human resources.
A focus on centres of excellence may undermine the development and dissemination of knowledge.
Individual, national, and international interests must be recognized.
In order to foster co-operative relationships within the scholarly community, all concerned parties, including suppliers and publishers, should be encouraged to participate in the pursuit of solutions for broad, affordable dissemination of scholarly communication.
A meeting similar to that described in Recommendation 3 of the AUCCCARL /ABRC task force report should be held, but expanded to include Canadian Association of University Teachers (CAUT), Fédération Québécoise des professeures et professeurs d'université (FQPPU), and the research-granting councils.
AUCC, in co-operation with other national bodies, should develop model licences for electronic products.
Scholars
Scholars should affirm quality over quantity as a matter of professional ethics. (In the discussions, much was made of the Harvard model, by which was meant placing a dramatic limitation on the number of articles a scholar can bring forward for consideration for gaining tenure and promotion.)
The awareness and involvement of scholars in addressing critical issues in the scholarly communication process must be addressed.
As a matter of principle, academics should publish in outlets that allow non-exclusive licensing. This principle should be promoted by AUCC, CAUT, and the granting councils.
To encourage non-profit scholarly publishing, academics, especially senior academics, should, as a matter of policy:
- participate in editorial peer-review functions of non-profit publishing outlets over for-profit outlets;
- publish in non-profit outlets when such outlets provide equivalent recognition.
All Canadian academic associations should support not-for-profit scholarly publishing and encourage their members to do so.
Publishers
In general, journals should be run by non-profit entities with the money earned staying within the research /university community.
Reasonable profits should be granted to for-profit publishers in return for service to the community.
The principle "public funds; public good; public access" should be affirmed. That is to say, given that scholarly communication is supported by public funds, it must be organized for the public good, and a paramount element in achieving the public good is maintaining wide public access.
Social profit must be balanced against economic profit.
Librarians
Librarians have a responsibility to make such issues as overpublication, high prices, and restricted access known to the scholarly community and to the general community and then respond to the community as a whole. Librarians should not have to act as watchdogs for the scholarly community as a whole.
Institutions
The publication of articles as a primary means for determining career progress comes at a cost. Such an emphasis should be reviewed, not only for its exclusion of salient elements of scholarly contribution, but also for its unnecessary contribution to excess costs and inefficient information production.
The involvement of senior administration and of the senior professoriate in addressing the issues discussed at this conference is key.
Academic institutions should develop access agreements to the widest range of resources to serve all sectors of the Canadian academic community at the least possible cost. This should be done at the highest level (for example, national, provincial, regional).
Policy priorities
Within scholarly publishing itself, a variety of models must be encouraged. Most importantly, a collaborative infrastructure and a scholar-owned-and-operated, not-for-profit "cottage industry" should be nurtured with sensitivity shown to the information poor within and outside Canada.
There must be strong support for knowledge production and dissemination, especially from federal research funding agencies who should be equally committed to research and communication funding.
The National Library should be supported in its efforts to archive electronic publications.
If information is to be a commodity, librarians must protect the interests of patrons in the name of citizenship rather than as consumers.
The transition to electronic technologies cannot be allowed to decrease access for all or for certain groups.
A sufficient information technology infrastructure must exist for scholars in all fields of inquiry. This infrastructure includes hardware, a wide range of skills, and institutional organizations. Institutional plans to develop that infrastructure should be shared between institutions. Plans should also be thorough, encompassing such obvious considerations as the handling of electronic theses.
The dissemination of government documents in electronic form to all citizens is critical.
Actions
The principle of "publish or perish" as the basis on which promotion and tenure is gained must be challenged and rebuilt. Teaching, as well as broad participation in professional activities, should be recognized.
Universities should be accredited on the basis of quality of publications.
The value of research syntheses should be recognized by federal research funding agencies.
AUCC and CARL should invite participation from the following groups to produce a new document building on The Changing World of Scholarly Communication (AUCCCARL /ABRC, 1996), which would then be followed by educational fora.
- Association of Canadian University Presses
- Canadian Association of University Teachers
- Canadian Association of Learned Journals
- Canadian Federation of Students
- Canadian Alliance of Student Associations
- Humanities and Social Science Federation of Canada.
The AUCCCARL /ABRC report should also be considered by individual universities.
Improved funding to the research-granting councils for the support of scholarly publishing should be encouraged.
Electronic journals should be peer reviewed and indexed.
A national body should negotiate site licenses for electronic publications.
Support of scholarly publishing should extend to:
- an examination of the continuing need for postal subsidies;
- the removal of sales taxes on books and journals;
- ensuring that charges for communications lines are not levied on the basis of elapsed time.
Financial support for electronic publishing should encourage electronic production in non-proprietary format (that is, Standard Generalized Markup Language [SGML]) and free distribution.
Means of distribution of scholarly publications to poorer countries should be assured.
Intellectual property policy that recognizes the interests of producers, distributors, and users must be developed.
Access to government information through such projects as the Data Liberation Initiative are critical. Joint private sector /public sector projects should generate publicly available information.
Electronic publication should be affirmed and supported.
Widespread and co-ordinated experimentation and innovation with electronic publication should be encouraged and means provided for sharing of results.
Intellectual property policies must be consistent with the new technologies.
Libraries must demand minimally restrictive licences when purchasing electronic products.
Universities should review their scholarly communication policies and shift allocations where appropriate. Universities could be more proactive in setting the agenda for research on scholarly communication and evaluating and encouraging alternative publishing models.
AUCCCARL /ABRC recommendations 4, 6 through 22 (excluding 19), plus 24 and 26 should be supported. All players should join together to assist in the formatting and dissemination of electronic scholarly information.
A subset of these players should exert their bargaining power to develop a national site-licensing program with international publishers to secure universal, affordable access to electronic journals, databases, and resources.
A different subset of players should discuss guaranteed no-cost bandwidth availability in order to enable electronic scholarly communication to permit institutions to direct resources towards infrastructure investments in workstation technologies and hence to enable access.
Intellectual property legislation and policies should recognize alternative, non-commercial models.
The Canadian Association of Graduate Studies should discuss with graduate students (nationally and locally) the creation of a framework for ownership of student intellectual property.
Various institutions and organizations, especially universities, scholars' associations, and granting councils, should actively discuss and promote the issues raised at the SCNM conference and develop indicators to monitor progress.
Afterthoughts
A number of points were raised in the SCNM conference or seemed implicit in the papers and discussions, yet they are unarticulated in this overview and the following papers. These few points are meant to bring some of those ideas forward.
Scholars must take responsibility for the costs of their publishing activities, including both the number of articles they write and the choice of journals in which they publish. Otherwise, it might seem reasonable for universities to attempt to obtain control over copyright and redesign the STM publication system. An extreme measure would be for universities to try to claim copyright and complete control over the work produced by scholars.
While it is easy to accept the principle of quality over quantity, in practice the application of the principle is rather difficult. In the humanities and social sciences, it is much less common than in the sciences for researchers to slice up research results and present them in a number of journals. More commonly, research is conducted and first reported in article or monograph form. On this basis, scholars may be asked to contribute to anthologies. Scholars often find themselves using data in subsequent publications, adding nuance and interpretation appropriate to the context. Often, no resources other than university-allocated time are provided for contributing to anthologies, hence no new research is undertaken. In such cases, accumulated and ongoing research is interpreted within the framework of the anthology.
While some might claim that such writing clutters the scholarly communication system, because it reports no new research, others might say that such essays are arguably positive insofar as scholars are making basic research available with a context that is likely to be used in classroom teaching. Perhaps a more serious consequence arises when scholars first report their research in anthologies. In this case, often, the research is never properly indexed, article by article. As a result, not only is the state of the field difficult to assess, but critical analysis of existing research cannot be thorough.
It appears that many scientists and, indeed, other scholars, believe that the high cost of access to their research confers a higher status upon them than they might otherwise have and than their colleagues in the humanities and social sciences. This is a groundless vanity for which the public should not pay.
In an attempt to raise awareness, Canadian universities might consider adopting a practice requiring each scholar, in listing his or her article publications, to undertake the following:
- Identify the publisher of each publication.
- Specify whether that publisher is for-profit, a professional association, or a not-for-profit publisher.
- Report, in the case where the scholar has been published by a for-profit publisher, the name of the next most appropriate, not-for-profit or association journal which might have published the article.
- Provide the cost of an annual institutional subscription.
- Specify whether the journal is available in his or her institution.
- Provide the circulation figure of the journal.
- Calculate the number of hours of direct effort spent in gathering new information for preparing the article cited.
For monograph publishing, scholars might be asked to report:
- the name and location of the publisher;
- the price of the monograph and the number of pages;
- the average price of other comparable monographs.
Following the lead of Keith Archer at the University of Calgary, scholars might apprise themselves of the ownership and subscription price of various journals and decline to review articles for certain journals.
It seems apparent that while there is value in the publication process, which is requiring scholars to conduct and report research and to communicate it in a fashion acceptable to other scholars, very little is known about the use of journals. A greater knowledge of journal usage might suggest means for substantially decreasing the drain on the public purse of the very necessary flow of ideas commonly referred to as scholarly communication.
Conclusion
The editors and this journal have moved forward to print and electronic publication with a selected proceedings of Scholarly Communication in the Next Millennium for a number of reasons. Like Newby, we take as a given that scholars and universities will move further and further into electronic publishing. We believe that these papers point to many of the different issues that must be considered in that evolution. Action is required at all levels of the system, from individual scholars through individual universities to national policy. Action will also be taken in the private sector by publishers, software developers, and hardware manufacturers. We see this collection, along with the AUCCCARL /ABRC reports, and indeed other work, as useful for all these actors. Both AUCC and CARL will need to continue to play leading roles in this challenge of transition. However, their efforts will need to be matched by research funding agencies and scholars themselves through both their faculty associations and their journal-related activities.
References
AUCCCARL /ABRC Task Force on Academic Libraries and Scholarly Communication. (1996). The changing world of scholarly communication: Challenges and choices for Canada. Ottawa: Author.