journals

ACS Solutions: The Sturm und Drang

ACRLog welcomes a guest post from Sue Wiegand, Periodicals Librarian at St. Mary’s College in Notre Dame, IN.

A chemical storm recently blew up across the blogosphere, involving the American Chemical Society journals, the serials crisis of unsustainably high prices, and one brave librarian, Jenica Rogers at SUNY Potsdam, who said “Enough!” The atmospheric conditions that caused this storm: high journal prices, clashing with low library budgets. Not a surprise, as these storms blow up frequently before subsiding, but the response to Jenica’s blog post thundered through the online community of librarians and scholars. Why? Because she implemented an unusual solution. She cancelled the high-priced “Big Deal” ACS package, after consultation with their Chemistry Department. Others have cancelled Big Deals, but Jenica cancelled ACS journals, when ACS is also the accreditor for Chemistry. She made sure SUNY Potsdam Chemistry scholars and students would still get access to the research they needed, they would just get it in different ways. Controversy swirled like the winds of change.

Other “serials crisis” storms have come and gone over the years: in 2010, the University of California threatened to not renew Nature Publishing Group journals; in 2012, thousands of scholars and librarians signed a petition to boycott Elsevier. Going back further, decades of complaint from librarians resulted in, well, even higher prices. So, cancelling is the direct approach—the action alternative to what hasn’t worked.

As both Periodicals Librarian and liaison to the Chemistry Department, I knew that the answer at SUNY Potsdam would be different from what we could do with the resources we have available here at Saint Mary’s College. Our consortial arrangements are different, our mission is different—we’re a small liberal arts college, not part of a state-wide system. A suggestion from others here was to try to persuade the Chemistry Department to give up their ACS accreditation, but I didn’t want to do that. I’ve worked closely with Chemistry faculty, not only in collection development for their journals, but on college-wide committees—I know they are reasonable people, and they are also shocked at unsustainably high pricing for scholarly articles. I reckoned the department and the library could work together to figure something out. The other librarians agreed: the time was right. Discussion ensued.

Some history: way back in 2002, after an interesting discussion of the new digital era for journals, a senior Chemistry professor came to me with a scenario based on what I’d told him was possible if he wanted to make a deal: cancel some Chemistry journals to use the money available to get SciFinder Scholar, the indexing and abstracting database. ACS was offering a deal: a “3 for 2” split with 2 similar institutions, so we could pay 1/3 of the cost of the SciFinder index. So we worked out which journals to cancel, which to keep, and we added SciFinder, a client-server product at that time, while keeping the necessary number of print ACS journals to keep our accreditation. The scenario accomplished this at no cost increase because we cancelled some print titles they didn’t want as much as they wanted the comprehensive, discipline-specific indexing.

Soon after, our state consortium offered an ACS “Big Deal” package: convert our ACS journals from print to online at the same price we were paying for print (the “historical spend”) and get many more journals for every library in the consortium. We converted. As with all Big Deals in the beginning, we marveled that we could get so many online journals at the same price we had been paying for our print subscriptions. I configured SciFinder to link our new titles, closed the catalog holdings, and shelved the print on the lower level, with signs on the Current Periodicals shelves: “This title is now online!” We added links. For Chemistry journals and indexing, at least, we were set for the brave new millennium.

Every year, the consortium negotiated small price increases, and more journals were added. Every year our budget stayed stagnant or went down while, subscription prices to other periodicals also went up. Faculty members in Chemistry were happy with the access they could get to the high-quality ACS journals, and frequently told me soWhen SciFinder became a web product, replacing the client-server model—even better (I was happy about that, too, in spite of the hassle with passwords and creating accounts that it entailed.) But the librarians thought the cost per use was too high for our small Chemistry Department. Then came Jenica’s blog post.

At Potsdam, librarians and Chemistry faculty decided to continue the ACS Legacy Archive, plus use Interlibrary Loan, add journals from the Royal Society (the Royal Society Gold package), and continue both STNEasy and Elsevier’s ScienceDirect database, which we don’t have at Saint Mary’s. Our mix is slightly different—after much discussion with Chemistry faculty and my librarian colleagues, we kept only the subscription to Journal of Chemical Education from ACS. We renewed the ACS Legacy Archive, and also kept our one Royal Society title (Chemical Society Reviews). The department agreed to use Interlibrary Loan when needed (as Jenica notes, ILL is also not free, but it is doable). We had post-cancellation access rights to 10 years of ACS content (next year, we must subscribe to another ACS title or pay an access fee to continue that).

We also kept SciFinder Scholar, still the single most important element to our faculty in Chemistry—they made this very clear from the first meeting I had with them. SciFinder is the indexing piece of the puzzle—it searches the Chemistry literature as a whole, not just the ACS journals, so it’s one place for them to search, and they like that. They already get non-ACS, non-subscribed journals from ILL, and they know it works well. We also, as did Jenica and the SUNY Potsdam librarians, encouraged faculty to use their ACS membership titles first for needed full-text found via SciFinder, and to consider having students also become members, since Society membership includes 25 “free” ACS articles, and student memberships are inexpensive.

The other solution I explored to complete the picture for us was to try using a document delivery service called FIZ AutoDoc, from FIZ Karlsruhe. FIZ (Fachinformationszentrum) is a not-for-profit German company that partners with the ACS, provides their document delivery, and also provides the STN databases. Implementation of the FIZ AutoDoc service required an incredible amount of mind-boggling documentation-reading, collaboration, copious emails, technical discussions, a webinar demo, a trial, and much angst. The sturm und drang, was not FIZ’s fault—they were extremely easy to work with, even though based far away in Germany. We just needed to figure out what we wanted and how to configure it to work with SFX, our link resolver, and our ideas about how to do this—how our workflow should go, who should do what, should it be mediated or unmediated, how it would look to the end-user—required much discussion. Eventually, we thought we had it—mediated by ILL would be best. No, wait! Maybe there is another way… The debate raged.

Ultimately, we did go with mediated by ILL, with the SFX link also in SciFinder. We added an SFX note about using free ACS membership articles if possible, and provided a list of ACS titles for use by ILL student workers. The account was set up with 2 passwords so the ILL Department can experiment with unmediated seamless access through SFX, so there is room for further improvement when the technical details are worked out. Meanwhile, requests for ACS articles are passed through to the ILL form, which is handily pre-populated by SFX from wherever they originate (since some ACS titles are also indexed in Academic Search Premier). ILL takes it from there in their usual efficient way.

So where do the philosophical questions come in? Is it ok for a library to purchase an article for just one person? What about sharing library resources? What about Fair Use? What about Open Access?

I have to say, I love the idea of Open Access, always have. I told the Chemistry Department that chemists everywhere should get together and start a subject repository like arXiv for Physics—this was quite humorous, apparently. In 2010, the University of Prince Edward Island’s library director, wanting to cancel Web of Science because of the high price, proposed an even more radical idea: librarians collaborating to build an index to scholarly literature that would be free and maintained by librarians. We all know the scholarly communication story by now. No one should be constrained from scholarly work by lack of resources wherever they are or what resources are available. Libraries are about sharing, at no cost to the users. Scholarly collaboration and library sharing shouldn’t have to be in competition, with large amounts of money at stake for access to published research. Yet, those devilish arguments go on.

Meanwhile, the ACS says it wants to work with researchers: “In the future… publishers will deal more directly with contributors and rely less on libraries as middlemen.” They have introduced ACS ChemWorx for research, collaboration, and reference management. In another example from a scholarly society, the Modern Language Association (MLA) is also working with researchers, but by making their author agreements more friendly to authors’ rights to self-archive, and by developing a platform for sharing: “members join the association less in order to receive its communications than to participate in them, to be part of the conversation, and to have their work circulated with the work being done in their community of practice.” They plan to emphasize their society role in “validation and credentialing”, developing new forms of peer review and scholarship in the MLA Commons.

This is the kind of action we can endorse and applaud. As librarians, let’s encourage scholarly societies to share scholarly work as the communities of practice they are at their best. Other collaborative platforms in various stages of adaptation include Zotero, Mendeley, Academia.edu, ResearchGate.org. There are also repositories, institutional and subject-based. The world is converging toward networking and collaborative research all in one place. I would like the library to be the free platform that brings all the others together.

Coming full circle, my vision is that when researchers want to work on their research, they will log on to the library and find all they need—discovering research ideas, the ability for seamless literature searching, accessing and saving citations for books and articles of interest in one place, downloading what they need, finding research collaborators through a network of scholars all over the world with similar interests, finding project management, having the ability to write and cite their research in a seamless way, sharing it informally, having it peer reviewed then formally published in a archived scholarly version of record, having it showcased and celebrated at each institution, then preserved for future scholars to discover and continue to build on. Walk in or log on, we could say to scholars and students alike—the library is the one place that has all you need to get your scholarly work done.

Let’s all, like Jenica, say enough with the old way! Let’s try some new ways and keep trying until we find or create something that works. This storm could help clear the air.

Evaluating Research By the Numbers

This month’s post in our series of guest academic librarian bloggers is by Bonnie Swoger, Science and Technology Librarian at the State University of New York (SUNY) Geneseo. She blogs at The Undergraduate Science Librarian.

Last week I taught an information literacy class to a group of senior Chemistry students. We didn’t talk about databases or indexes, we talked about numbers. We talked about impact factors and h-indexes and alternative metrics, and the students loved it. Librarians have used these metrics for years in collection development, and have looked them up to help faculty with tenure and promotion packets. But many librarians don’t know where the numbers come from, or what some of the criticisms are.

The students in this class needed to select a research topic, and the professor was tired of reading about obscure and “uninteresting” topics. He wanted his students to be able to find out what’s “hot” right now in chemical research.

At this level, the students are just starting to develop a sense about the nature of chemical research. It is hard for them to look at a journal article and know if that item is “hot” (or not). Librarians are often in the same boat. But there are some strategies for helping non-specialists do this. One is to look at science news sites such as C&E News, and the news wings of Science and Nature.

Another strategy is to make use of the metrics used to quantitatively assess journals, authors and articles.

We started the class by talking about the Journal Impact Factor (JIF) developed by Eugene Garfield and Irving Sher almost 50 years ago (see this article for the history of the JIF). It is a simple calculation:

JIF = Number of Citations/Number of articles

I had asked the students to read a brief commentary prior to class discussing the use (and abuse) of this metric, and in class we discussed some of criticisms of the number:

The numerator and denominator count different things (commentary articles are included in the numerator but not the denominator, so a journal can get an extra boost if commentary-type articles are cited)
The publication of review articles can quickly increase the impact factor because they are more likely to be cited.

These students were particularly interested in how the JIF could be manipulated and intrigued to learn about the story of how a single article increased the impact factor of Acta Crystallographia – Section A from 2 to 50 in a single year.

Importantly, we talked about how the impact factor was never meant to assess individual articles or authors.

So we explored alternatives.

The h-index was first suggested by physicist Jorge Hirsch, and and is now sometimes used to assess the influence of particular authors.

It works like this: Let’s say that professor Jane Smith has published 5 articles. Each article has been cited a different number of times:

Article	Citations
Article 1	9
Article 2	10
Article 3	4
Article 4	2
Article 5	1

The h-index is the number that fills in the phrase “x number of articles have been cited x number of times.” In this case, we can easily say that 3 of Jane’s papers have been cited at least 3 times, so she has an h-index of 3. The major citation indexes (Scopus, Web of Knowledge) can calculate this number easily.

Like all other measures, h-index isn’t perfect. It never decreases, even as a researcher’s influence in their field decreases. It favors fields that tend to have larger numbers of authors on each paper (like high energy physics), and it can easily be manipulated by citing your own papers (or those of your friends and relatives). It does provide a way to try to sort out those authors who just write a lot from those authors who write a lot of good stuff.

We then turned to a brief discussion about some of the alternative metrics now being proposed by various journals and publishers. Some of the simplest measures in this category are the number of on-site views of an article and the number of times a PDF has been downloaded. Other tools include article ratings, comments, and how many times an article has been bookmarked. I think these developments are exciting, and it will be interesting to see how scholars react as more publishers offer these services.

Of course, none of these numbers are useful without context. Is an impact factor of 12 in organic chemistry considered good or bad? What about an h-index of 7 for a cancer researcher? And when an article is downloaded 457 times, what does that actually mean?

At the end of the class, I gave students an article citation and asked to students to determine if the research topic (and the article) was “hot” or not. They were asked to find some of the relevant metrics, and asked to provide a bit of background to give some context to their numbers. They had fun exploring the numbers, and I think they felt more confident in their ability to determine how important or buzz-worthy their prospective research topics might be as a result of our in-class discussion.

The numbers without context aren’t very helpful. But if you can find the numbers, and gain a sense of context, they can help non-specialists gain a sense of perspective about particular journals, authors and articles.

The Age of Big Access

This month marks the second in our new series of guest posts from academic librarians around the biblioblogosphere. October’s post is from Iris Jastram, the Reference & Instruction Librarian for Languages and Literature at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. She also blogs at Pegasus Librarian.

While we were all busy wondering what it means to be a librarian in the Age of Google, we got flanked. This is not the Age of Google after all. That was just a distraction — a clever and dazzling light show. Meanwhile, behind the curtain, a totally different age was gathering itself: The Age of Big Access.

We saw and were outraged by Elsevier’s extortionist tactics. You know the story: our scholarly communities can’t function without these journals. We needed to provide access, Elsevier knows we needed to provide access, and so we have no leverage. The part of our librarianly DNA that is hardwired to provide access and further scholarly pursuits kicks in and overrides everything else.

We saw and were outraged by OCLC’s revised Use and Transfer guidelines. Sure, we could decide not to hand the record over to OCLC, but then the other systems that we really do need (such as ILL) wouldn’t work as well. We couldn’t lend our items, which means we couldn’t build up credits, which means that we couldn’t afford to borrow as much. Our scholarly community would suffer. We need to provide access, OCLC knows we need to provide access, and so we have no leverage. That librarianly DNA kicks in again.

We saw and were outraged by EBSCO’s increasing holdings of exclusive rights to periodicals, often offered through increasingly obscure EBSCO aggregators. But we need to provide access, the journals know it, they contract with EBSCO to get as much out of EBSCO as they can, we have no leverage. That blasted librarianly DNA keeps kicking in.

We saw and were outraged by Nature Publishing Group’s price hikes, made public by the University of California system when that system announced a boycott (PDF) of all of Nature’s periodicals and Nature-related activities. How dare Nature sell our own work back to us at such a price, we asked. Because we need to provide access to these things, Nature knows it, and so we have no leverage. Is there any way to amputate DNA?

We saw and were outraged by OCLC yet again when a lawsuit reminded us just how often we have no choice of vendor now that OCLC controls our cataloging, ILL, and to a lesser but growing extent, our catalogs. Apparently librarianly DNA loves these parasitic relationships around providing access.

And weren’t we just talking about how we’re no longer gatekeepers now that there’s so much free information out there? What about information overload and result fatigue? Have we wondered and worried about our futures so long that the future got written by big corporations in the business of selling us access, and selling it to us again, and then selling it to us again?

As usual, Barbara Fister is way ahead of me with her Liberation Bibliography manifesto. But what about me? I don’t have an activist bone in my body, but surely recognizing that I’m living the wrong future must have some effect. Surely there’s a place for instruction librarians in this alternate future.

I was pretty comfortable with my role as an instruction librarian in the Age of Google. I’m totally at sea trying to figure out my role as an instruction librarian in the Age of Big Access.

Sudden Thoughts And Second Thoughts

What About That Other Academic Librarianship Journal

If you asked most academic librarians to name “the” scholarly journal for academic librarians I believe you’d get one of three responses: College & Research Libraries; Journal of Academic Librarianship; and portal: Libraries and the Academy. Those are probably the top three, but does that show our American bias? I’m probably guilty of this myself because I never really even considered the New Review of Academic Librarianship, which has some pretty interesting articles. In this issue I came across a good article by Derik Law titled “Academic Digital Libraries of the Future: An Environment Scan” – well worth reading. I hope you’ll expand your academic library journal horizons and take a look at an issue of New Review of Academic Librarianship.

Listen to My Podcast with Sarah Long

If you like ACRLog you’ll probably like this podcast I did with Sarah Long. You might be surprised to find out which one of my ACRLog posts caught her attention – and why. Then we got into a conversation about different blog posts, and Sarah asks me about the inspiration for the posts. It’s a pretty good conversation – and Sarah thinks I’ve got talent. She is a very nice person – and a darn good podcast interviewer!

Looking for the NEXT BIG THING

Do you ever think about the next big thing? Will it be Google Wave? The Semantic Web? The Apple Tablet? A communication device implanted in your body? And wouldn’t you like to get your hands on it, and be the first person in academic libraryland to put it to some good use? I suppose we’re all wondering what the next big thing is, and how we can find out about it – and possibly make some use out of it. That’s why I enjoyed this post I found over at the blog Not Just Admissions. It makes me realize that librarians aren’t the only ones in higher education that are always on the lookout for the next big thing. It’s a fun post with a point, and perhaps the most important one is that a good idea can come from anywhere in your organization.

What Are You Planning for National Information Literacy Month

It’s about time. I may be wrong with my date here (and I’m sure a librarian will correct me) but I believe information literacy dates back to the 1970s – I’m vaguely thinking the term information literacy was coined in 1974. That makes me ask how come it took so darn long for a president to declare National Information Literacy Month. This calls for a celebration of some sort. Perhaps a party in the library with lots of cake. Maybe a banner in the library instruction room. I just wonder if getting its own month means that information literacy is finally an acceptable term – or do we have to keep coming up with ways to talk about information literacy without having to actually use or say “information literacy.”