Scholarly Communication

Reviewing peer review

As a process that validates information credibility, peer review is undeniably and incredibly valuable—when it works. But sometimes it doesn’t work as well as we’d like.

Photo by Joaquin Alcaraz on Unsplash. Alt image: A lighted gatehouse stands in the middle of a dark road, with a barrier raised on the left side and another barrier lowered on the right side.

[Update 9/4: At request from Clarivate, I have corrected a reference to the organization’s treatment of eLife, which is partially indexed in Web of Science’s “Emerging Sources Citation Index.”]

As Peer Review Week nears (September 15-19), I’ve been reflecting on this process that has become so ingrained in the contemporary production and communication of scholarship. What follows are some of my meandering thoughts on the current state of peer review, about which I certainly do not claim to be the foremost expert. Many smart people have been wrestling with peer review for quite a while; I’m just another librarian-blogger weighing in.

Issues

Peer review is a critical component of today’s scholarly publishing process. The validation of information via peer review is perhaps the main value scholarly publishers purport to provide (in addition to infrastructure, like persistent identifiers and metadata). In an age of rampant mis- and disinformation, when most research is published in countries whose democracies and press freedoms are under threat, a process that validates information credibility is undeniably and incredibly valuable—when it works.

But sometimes it doesn’t work as well as we’d like. As of August 26, 2025, Retraction Watch’s database contains records for over 66,000 articles that have been retracted or marked as concerning since they began tracking in 2017. Over 43,000 of those articles were published in the last 10 years, between 2014-2025.

We can’t lay blame at the feet of individual peer reviewers for a problem so systemic and complex and persistent. A (literally) large part of the issue is the incomprehensible amount of scholarship flowing through the system: in 2022, just 10 of the largest publishers produced around 2.82 million journal articles. Retraction Watch reports 9,973 retracted or markedly concerning articles by those same publishers in 2022[1], meaning the rate was around 0.35%, or about 1 in every 282 articles. Even if that might otherwise seem like a permissibly low error rate, the sheer quantity of submissions in the system still meant nearly 10,000 deeply flawed or fraudulent articles made it through peer review in 2022, many of which appeared in journals owned by well-known and established publishers. That is a startling number and a direct consequence of the immense strain on the scholarly journal publishing system.

Even while acknowledging those conditions, the blind method of peer review also deserves some scrutiny. Double-blind peer review is the particular flavor I can speak to from experience, during which neither the authors nor the reviewers are privy to each other’s identities (you’ve likely heard of/encountered the oft-maligned Reviewer 2). Review interactions are de-identified and kept private from readers. The main rationale behind this approach to peer review is that anonymity (such that it can be achieved) protects both authors and reviewers from bias, whether positive or negative, and from potential retribution. These are, without doubt, important considerations that should not be dismissed lightly. Many disciplines have relatively small communities of scholars, and particular specialties within disciplines are shared by even smaller groups who might often be called upon as experts to review each other’s work. However, the need to invite niche experts as peer reviewers may result in unavoidable opportunity for bias, as a new report suggests peer reviewers are more likely to recommend studies for publications that cite their own work.

Involving disciplinary experts is necessary because peer review is meant to do more than check citation accuracy and assess methodology and catch evidence of generative AI authorship. It is also meant to help authors address valid questions about their work and communicate new insights more clearly via constructive feedback. This begs the question: is the blind peer review process constructive? Again, I can only speak to my experience participating in a few double-blind peer review processes for journal articles as both author and reviewer. I do think those reviews improved the clarity and quality of the ultimate products, but although I appreciated that improvement as both author and reviewer, the interactions between authors and reviewers didn’t feel particularly constructive. I recall them feeling somewhat rude, combative, and dismissive, despite the manuscripts’ eventual acceptance. This is all anecdotal, of course, and I could have been unlucky (and probably sound whiny). I’m curious to hear about other folks’ experiences. Still, I’ve come away from those interactions further convinced that anonymity does not usually bring out the best in folks, especially when they’re likely overworked. Overworked reviewers might even be tempted to make undisclosed use of Generative AI themselves for a little relief, to which authors are now responding by hiding prompts in their manuscripts to encourage positive reviews. In sum, one of blind peer review’s critical flaws is the lack of reviewer accountability, in both the spirit and integrity of the review.[2]

Another part of the peer reviewers’ role is to recommend the article for acceptance or rejection, so some level of judgement is a necessary part of the system. However, in a system where acceptance/rejection rates are a badge of honor for journals, one starts to wonder whether the current mode of peer review is still founded in the spirit of progressing knowledge, or if it’s been turned into a zero-sum game for publishers’ private gain.

In the same vein, the behind-the-curtains nature of blind peer review enables the devaluation of reviewers’ labor even though it is the core service publishers (or rather, editorial boards) provide to the scholarly communication system. The flip side of public accountability is public recognition, which is also lost in the blind peer review process. Scholars are expected to volunteer their peer review services as part of their contribution to the progress of knowledge in their field, while for-profit publishers just so happen to enjoy the material profits of that uncompensated labor. There are some exceptions to this rule as more journals work with services like ORCID to formally acknowledge peer reviewers. There are also strong opposing arguments, specifically for paying peer reviewers. Regardless, it’s not a big leap to connect the devaluation of peer reviewers’ labor to longer review timelines, difficulty in finding willing peer reviewers, and the increasing number of retracted journal articles whose peer reviewers missed major flaws and/or falsified information.

Libraries

How does all this impact academic libraries? To start, our collection development responsibilities position us as arbiters of information legitimacy. If something is in our collection, we’ve symbolically stamped it with our seal of approval to some degree. Of course, we can’t review and fact check of every piece of content in our collections, and even if we had the time, we wouldn’t have the expertise to do so across disciplines. We rely on “reputable” sources to facilitate this validation of credible scholarship, often via blind peer review. But if the system we’ve relied on to legitimize scholarship isn’t working as well as it could (in many ways), then as information professionals, we necessarily should be interested in potential solutions and alternative approaches. Further, considering our goals to promote information literacy, I’d argue that blind peer review obscures from readers the constructed and contextual nature of authority, the process of information creation, and the layers of conversation that underpin a specific piece of scholarship. Blind peer review is simply not an ideal fit in an information age when transparency and trustworthiness feel so imperiled.

So, are there viable alternatives to blind peer review?

Again, smart folks have been wrestling with peer review for quite a while. Below are a few interesting approaches that have been/are currently being tested. Many of these approaches would fall under the general category of “open peer review,” but they use the term “open” to mean different things about the review process, so I’m going to distinguish them more explicitly, if possible, although they do share an openness as compared to blind peer review.

Small Changes

The most modest adjustment to blind peer review is simply to make both authors and reviewers aware of each other’s identities. Let’s call this “pre-publication open identities” peer review. Although this approach may encourage more humanity between its participants, it leaves other issues (e.g. reviewer recognition, context) unaddressed.

For those who want to retain the current review workflow but don’t think pre-publication open identities review moves the needle much, “transparent” peer review would be the next step to consider. The basic premise is that some amount of the review interaction is included as part of the final published product. This alternative seems palatable to some of the larger publishers (like Wiley and IEEE, for example), as it doesn’t threaten much about their workflow or revenue streams.

A Big Change

To this last point: In a 2024 interview with the Scholarly Kitchen, Nici Pfeiffer, Chief Product Officer at the Center for Open Science (known most for the Open Science Framework), offered this response to a question about the biggest opportunities facing the scholarly communication community:

“The biggest opportunities that lay before us are the separation of peer review from the publication of scholarship, and more assessment tools to evaluate the quality, rigor, reproducibility, robustness, etc. of research outcomes. To realize these opportunities, we will need to embrace new business models for publication, how we reward and incentivize getting it right over getting it published, and putting research evaluation in the hands of the communities that practice it.”

If we were to rethink the publication workflow to achieve a more democratized and community-governed peer review process, what would that look like, exactly?

Both compelling and provocative, one approach that’s gaining traction is “preprint review,” also dubbed “publish-review-curate” by MetaResearch Open Review, one of its adopters (along with eLife, Open Research Europe, and others). In these preprint review/publish-review-curate models, authors post their preprint (i.e. initial draft) in an open repository and provide a link to the relevant review organization (e.g. MetaROR), who facilitates peer review, publishes those reviews and an editorial assessment, provides a platform for public comment from readers, and categorizes the review materials in a disciplinary collection on their site. In MetaROR’s case, the review service does not publish the author’s work, and the author retains copyright and is able to do what they wish with the work at that point, including taking it to a traditional publisher if they so choose. F1000 and eLife serve as both the preprint repository and the review service to consolidate all elements in one location (here’s an example of what this looks like). Some of these review services are free for authors and some are not; some allow reviewers to remain anonymous and some do not. To me, the ideal version would not allow anonymous reviews and would be free to use, although that may be hard to achieve.

The scholarly publishing establishment has not been particularly receptive to the preprint review model, most notably via Clarivate’s decision to temporarily suspend eLife from its Web of Science database and eventually deem it ineligible for an impact factor, because eLife publishes all preprints on its platform that are accepted into the review process, regardless of positive or negative review [this sentence was updated on 9/4 by request from Clarivate, as eLife is now partially indexed in their “Emerging Sources Citation Index .”] In contrast, the European Commission’s state-backed commitment to this model and the Gates Foundation’s requirement of preprint submission both serve as strong evidence of preprints’ potential as a radical alternative to the traditional blind peer review publishing workflow.

To me, the transparency of preprint review seems to encourage accountability, effort, and fairness from reviewers; allows for their labor to be incentivized; enriches scholarship with context that supports information literacy; and promises to expedite the entire review process. As Christopher Steven Marcum notes in his excellent essay on the firehose problem in scholarly communication, preprint review may help “…shift peer review from a monoculture maintained solely by publishers into an entire ecosystem largely maintained by researchers, their institutions, and their funders.” And although it might not solve the overload problem itself, it does begin to incentivize other contributions to the field aside from the publish-or-perish pressures that burden so many academics, and gives their institutions the chance to recognize credited peer review in tenure portfolios.

What’s your review?

If you’ve read this long, thank you, and I’m curious about your thoughts on peer review. Does it need fixing? If so, what pathway do you find most promising? As information professionals, we belong in these conversations. Thanks for your thoughts.

[1] To match the publishers studied by Hanson et al. (2024), I used the following search string in the Publisher field of Retraction Watch’s database, filtered for papers published between 01/01/2022–12/31/2022: [BioMed Central (BMC) OR Elsevier OR Frontiers OR Hindawi OR MDPI OR Nature Publishing Group OR PLoS OR Springer OR Springer – Nature Publishing Group OR Taylor and Francis OR Wiley OR Wiley-Blackwell].

[2] Single-blind peer review is another method, in which the authors are blinded to the reviewers’ identities, but the reviewers are aware of the authors’ identities. To me, this approach manages to both a) not hold reviewers accountable for their work and b) guarantee the chance for bias in the review process. Without any obvious benefits, and I don’t understand why a single-blind approach would be preferable.

Recognizing and Citing Indigenous Oral Knowledge: An Interview with Lorisia MacLeod

In June of 2021, Lorisia MacLeod, a librarian from the James Smith Cree Nation, published an article called “More Than Personal Communication: Templates for Citing Indigenous Elders and Knowledge Keepers,” presenting citation templates to recognize Indigenous knowledge in academia. Because both APA and MLA style guides encourage writers to cite any oral communication that does not have a written or audio recording as “personal communication,” Indigenous oral teaching gets put “on the same footing as a quick phone call, […] while even tweets are given a reference citation.”

By using MacLeod’s templates to include a full citation in a References or Works Cited list, Indigenous oral knowledge can be “presented as an equal and valid information format alongside familiar formats like books and journals.” Lorisia has generously agreed to be interviewed for ACRLog about her work; I invite you to click the link above and read her original article as well!

Q: In news coverage about this project, you’ve shared that you first realized the need for better citation of oral communication when you were an undergraduate studying anthropology, and that you worked with the Indigenous Student Centre at NorQuest College in Edmonton to develop templates for APA and MLA style. Tell me more about the process of creating custom citation templates. Was your institution supportive from the beginning? How did you select which elements to include?

A: That’s right, I was very lucky to have two amazing anthropology professors during my undergraduate—Dr. Jack Ives and Dr. Kisha Supernaut (Métis)—who really recognized the importance of including Indigenous voices especially in a field that traditionally studied Indigenous people but in a very extractive way. I felt they both really highlighted the importance of community-engaged archaeology and taught about valuing Indigenous voices despite the historical academic records lack of Indigenous representation. Of course one of the tricky things about valuing something in academia is that often our value is shown by whose voices are highlighted, so if citation styles don’t recognize Indigenous ways of knowing it can be really hard to fully achieve that level of respect it deserves. At the time, I just remember thinking someone should change that limitation—make ways of citing our oral teachings more equal. Fast forward a few years and I’m talking about things academic institutions could do as actions to support reconciliation, indigenization, decolonization etc and I realize as an Indigenous librarian that maybe it was something I could be involved in doing. Since I had developed good relationships with the staff in the Indigenous Student Centre at NorQuest it really was about drafting up some examples of alternate citation templates and just asking if I could show it to them and talk.

I think I was really lucky because there was a lot of support—folks seemed to understand that it was important to take action, to make a change, in order to make the big buzzwords mean anything. I’ll admit, the fact that it was developed by an Indigenous librarian and the input from the folks in the Indigenous Student Centre helped (big shout out to Delores, Elliott, Conor, and Karie)— I had some great friends there cheering us on every step of the way and really trying to uplift our voices. When I started out drafting up something to talk about, I actually relied heavily on Elements of Indigenous Style: A Guide for Writing By and About Indigenous Peoples by Gregory Younging (an amazing resource for anyone and everyone to read in my opinion). It does a great job of talking about how nations differ so it’s important to try to be precise, and other key ideas that lead me to look at what relationships mattered in a citation. From there it really seemed to flow together, trying to mimic the way that other citations for books are done, I tried to interweave that with elements like who is their nation, what is the teaching about. I tried to keep it general so it could be flexible—not every nation, person, or teaching would be the same, so some elements became if applicable. This was a part where having the amazing folks in the Indigenous Student Centre was irreplaceable, just talking about how we’d use this piece of the template or maybe this part would be better phrased like this. They also helped to figure out which parts should be included so it really was a group effort that organically formed in some ways. I guess it’s really fitting that citation templates about citing and valuing our words were mostly made through chats!

Q: Undergraduate research assignments often direct students toward published, written information, and students might not consider consulting other sources, like Indigenous oral knowledge. What ways could professors incorporate Indigenous knowledge in research assignments? How can we design assignments that get students to branch out from “traditional” information formats like books and articles?

A: So I’m a strong believer that there are connections to Indigenous knowledge in pretty much every subject BUT the key when it comes to incorporating Indigenous knowledge is really relationships. If instructors want to incorporate Indigenous knowledges, especially oral teachings, I really hope they are looking to invest in long-term mutually respectful relationships with Indigenous knowledge keepers. It’s technically incorporation to get the Elder-in-resident to come to speak in class once or send students to them but it isn’t really a good relationship to me. We only have so many Knowledge Keepers and they only have so much time so using them for one-offs for a class to check some box—well, it doesn’t feel any different from the extractive knowledge processes of many early settlers. Long-term engagement is more work but it’s honestly the kind of investment that has the potential to create real change.

So that’s a long-term thing but that isn’t to say there isn’t something folks could do right now. I think for instructors you’ll want to start by looking at your own syllabus—look at the readings you have and whose voices they are. If you don’t have Indigenous voices, then maybe you should change whose voices you are raising up (this can also apply to other minority voices that may not be represented in your syllabus).

In both your syllabus and in your assignments, consider why you are putting in requirements about works cited having to be academic articles? There are tons of amazing Indigenous scientists, Knowledge Keepers, language keepers, activists etc that are really active on social media platforms like Twitter and TikTok. Now I’m not saying only use Twitter feeds for your readings, but infusing these into your assignments and syllabus is actually also going to teach learners information literacy skills. It’ll teach them how to engage with social media with a critical eye and combine various information formats to get a better picture of something. But a lot of that does depend on instructors and institution policies, just remember—just because something has always been done one way, doesn’t mean it’s the best way or that it’s still the best way now.

Q: What other ways can academic libraries demonstrate respect for Indigenous ways of knowing?

A: This can be a bit of a tricky question to answer generally because it really depends on where each institution is at—some have great ties with local Indigenous groups, others have only just started trying out land acknowledgements. But here are some broad ideas:

Be honest with yourself, your institution, and your staff about where you really are: if you are still mostly doing virtue-signalling actions but aren’t able to acknowledge that’s what they are, it’s going to be really hard for anyone to be able to plan a realistic path forward. That can also impact the ability and interest of Indigenous communities to partner with you.
Who is in your collection and how? Take a look at Indigenous authors in all fields and look at how they are catalogued, what is their metadata. And when do you promote them? Please don’t only bring out the Indigenous authors for Indigenous History Month- they deserve to be highlighted in your STEM displays, your general literature displays, and the same goes for however you promote resources to your faculty.
Invest in staff learning: This has to be an ongoing area of learning and commitment with institutional support. Academic institutions have their roots in systems that kept out Indigenous peoples and our knowledges (or appropriated them) so for many professionals, the voices we have today probably weren’t something they learned about in their classes. So if there is a webinar panel of Indigenous scientists coming up then yes—the science liaison librarian should probably be attending.
Look at the Calls to Action and the CFLA TRC report: I know, these documents are getting older and are Canadian-centric but that doesn’t mean that all the calls have been met or that they aren’t useful for others. Find actions you need to take and then hold yourself/your institutions accountable to working on them. An important thing to note with this is that process is often viewed as a linear path—in my experience, true respectful actions might take a less direct path. A library might realize that they didn’t have the relationships they thought they had and need to change the plan to develop those—I don’t think that’s a failure. To me, that kind of openness to adapt and change is a reflection of respect, it acknowledges that true respect requires ongoing engagement and the needs of the parties involved naturally will change over time.
Have Indigenous knowledges in your library: Yes this, of course, means buying Indigenous books but consider how our knowledges aren’t limited to that format. What about art? What about having storytellers and Knowledge Keepers? What about partnering with your institutions’ Indigenous student centre or local Indigenous groups?

Q: Who are some librarians (or experts in other fields/identities) that inspire and influence you in your work?

A: Aside from those I talked about above, I have to start off with the obvious (and slightly sappy) answer which is that my Dad (Kirk MacLeod) and sister (Kaia MacLeod) are huge inspirations to me. My Dad was in the library field for over a decade before me, so he was one of those Indigenous librarians who helped make space for future generations like me and my sister. The field he entered was very different from when I entered shortly after the release of the TRC report; he has always cheered me on and been a role model on leading change but remaining humble. Kaia just entered librarianship and in addition to being a really awesome librarian in her own right, she motivates me to keep trying to improve the field for all future Indigenous librarians, just like our Dad did for us. Now that we are all in the same field, they give me feedback and their perspectives from other areas in the field too! Plus it’s a constant reminder that the field is full of amazing people to work with, like Jessie Loyer a fantastic Cree-Métis librarian, cousin, and friend who always seemed to know just the right thing to say to empower early-career Indigenous librarians to create change.

Gregory Younging (Opsakwayak Cree Nation): His book Elements of Indigenous Style was a huge inspiration. I’m pretty sure I recommended that read to everyone I knew—it was an amazing guide that somehow managed to walk a fine line between instructional and allowing for space for community engagement. That was a stance that I’ve really tried to emulate in my own work because I think it is a perfect way of tackling Indigenous matters without falling into the pan-Indigenous identity trap.

Eve Tuck (Unangax? ), K. Wayne Yang, Rubén Gaztambide-Fernández: If you haven’t taken a look at The Citation Challenge, I would highly recommend it. This was part of what drove home for me the important role that citation has in respect and power systems.

Dr Jessica Hernandez (Zapotec and Ch’orti’): An amazing Indigenous scientist who I’ve followed for years. Now I’m not a scientist but her work is a great example of the amazing work current Indigenous scholars make that deserves to be considered for syllabus readings. Supporting scholars like her is part of what inspires me! She recently just published a new book too: Fresh Banana Leaves: Healing Indigenous Landscapes Through Indigenous Science.

At the risk of creating a ridiculously long list I think I’ll cut myself off there.

Thank you to Lorisia MacLeod for her contributions to scholarly communication, and for sharing her thoughts with us here at ACRLog.

Thank You, Next? (Consortia Edition)

As November calls for an attitude of gratitude, I will try to frame this post accordingly despite my exhaustion from this past month’s activities. I’m not, as you may expect, referring to Thanksgiving dinner, holiday travel, or family arguments, but to journal package renewals — a critical annual activity for acquisitions and collection management librarians, vendors, publishers, and (as concerns this post) library consortia.

What are consortia?
Consortia are member organizations that utilize the greater power of a collective body in order to influence more favorable outcomes than the individual bodies might be able to alone. Consortia in libraries historically began as a means of sharing resources, such as books via interlibrary loan or labor resources via union cataloging. Consortia services evolved along with library collections to include collective e-resources licensing, acquisition, and access to online resources. As a librarian responsible for acquiring, licensing, and sharing collection resources, I appreciate the efficiency of labor that consortia offers these workflows. In the shared purchasing realm, consortia facilitate a singular license negotiation process for its member libraries and negotiate unique pricing terms for content, often packaged in the form of so-called ‘Big Deals’. Perhaps less often, but just as important, consortia use a collective influence to represent and voice members’ shared concerns. This summer, I participated with consortia voicing opposition to an unfavorable publisher policy that would limit access to online content, which succeeded in winning a reversal from the publisher.

To blave…
Now libraries have been questioning the value of the Big Deal, consortia or not, for some time. Yet many libraries continue to commit their budget dollars to it year after year, perpetuating its existence and the lack of any market alternatives. Being up to my eyeballs in four simultaneous Big Deal analyses for the past year and a half, I’m so ready to call these deals’ bluff.

via GIPHY

To be clear, Big Deals are not exclusive to consortia arrangements. Many libraries subscribe and break from such deals all on their own, as this popular SPARC resource can affirm. https://sparcopen.org/our-work/big-deal-cancellation-tracking/ However, consortia arrangements of Big Deals cause big problems for libraries because in the process and effect of these arrangements, consortia don’t function as a consortia. Here’s why.

The effect
Purchasing bulk packaged content like the Big Deal based on libraries’ historic spend, as opposed to publisher list price, does translate to a kind of library savings. It also creates a predictable budget projection for libraries and a predictable profit for publishers due to fixed annual increases negotiated as part of these deals. That’s pretty much it for the benefits, and even those don’t hold together. Any consortia benefit from predictability in library budgets gets completely outweighed by the elimination of libraries’ flexibility to reduce spend when needed, as both commitment to spend and content are locked into these deals. Likewise, the compounding cost of annual increases have a predictably deficit effect on library budgets.

This inflexibility also leads to homogenized library collection-building (Thomson, Peters, & Hulbert, 2002), as libraries share and provide access to the same scholarly content, rather than (as in traditional resource sharing) resources unique to their respective collections. Also, a significant portion of Big Deal package content remains unused, falsely inflating its overall value and trapping libraries in multi-year agreements to buy what they don’t need and increasingly can’t afford. This kind of purchase means fewer library collection dollars spent on more diverse collection needs, whether because there are fewer such purchases that can be afforded, or even simply that these remain more possible to cancel.

The process
Quite basically, the normal expectation for a renewal process means library data gets analyzed by collection representatives in the spring for final decisions in the summer. Ideally, those decisions get communicated to acquisitions representatives, vendors, and/or consortia reps in the early fall. Then consortia and e-resource librarians (plus respective general counsel) negotiate new contracts before the December expire. The actual renewal process looks quite different. Since publishers don’t release current pricing until summer, consortia get offers out for its members’ collection representatives to analyze in early fall. This compressed timeframe leaves little room for libraries making consortia purchase decisions to analyze anything, nor does it allow sufficient collaboration from all necessary stakeholders.

To share is the Latin root of ‘communication’. Again, quite basically, the shared information concerning consortia ranges from books to labor to negotiating power. But what works well for sharing books and its associated labor is quite different from sharing information related to negotiating power and the labor associated with managing online resources. Besides the varying usage value of these purchases, the contract and term needs continue to vary from library to library. Those needs can change more frequently each year for libraries than buying, sharing, and cataloging books ever has. New formats beget new kinds of information, requiring new structures, methods, and individuals involved in the communicating.

From my vantage point — and, I grant you, there are many that I am missing here — libraries and consortia are falling short of what’s necessary to collectively communicate in ways that make consortia purchases beneficial to libraries.

The alternatives
Machovec (2017) sees two competing forces at stake for consortia and libraries: “the need to grow collaboration to more efficiently acquire products and services; and the need to cut programs and services that can no longer be funded” [emphasis mine]. To grow collaboration, as I interpret Machovec to suggest, means allowing more time to share, react, analyze, and compare collaboratively, not just the group individually. I know it sounds counterintuitive that more communication would be necessary for efficiency. But understand, efficiency doesn’t just deal in the currency of predictability. The currency we should value is flexibility.

Currently, consortia purchasing models, while designed to save libraries money, still offer no comparable programs and service alternatives to address libraries’ collective declining funding. I believe consortia have a role to play in negotiating favorable alternatives or so-called “exit terms” for its members, just as they may continue to offer well-negotiated Big Deals for members needing and willing to afford that kind of predictability. I don’t believe these two interest necessarily conflict, considering how libraries have historically participated in consortia. But having been part of a group of libraries working on that kind of proposal, I have greater appreciation for the complexity and skill involved and a new perspective on future possibilities.

For consortia to stay in the purchasing game, from which at least part of their operational funds rely, they will need to grow the facilitation and communication side of their business. Investing in people, systems, skills, and new relationships will be key to negotiating different alternatives and to negotiating the complexity of members’ changing needs.

References

The title for this post inspired by the song by Ariana Grande, in case you wanna listen.

Thompson, J., Peters, T., & Hulbert, L. (2002). Library Consortia. The Serials Librarian, 42(3-4), 177-182.

Machovec, G. (2017). Trends in Higher Education and Library Consortia. Journal of Library Administration, 57(5), 577-584.

Invisibility and Ubiquitousness: How Digital Libraries Should Tell Their Story.

Under pressure from the presumed loss of influence, the contemporary academic library is often in the business of staking claims on campus. We see new technology or innovations as opportunities to ingrained ourselves deeper in the future of the institution. Partially, this is a reaction to the change in the world and a move away from books but also a survival strategy in declining budgets. As the Ithaka survey on “Library Leadership for the Digital Age” last spring told us “All libraries are now digital…. Users think libraries are—or at least should be—digital.” As someone who left the print world for the digital, I can say within my own experience this is true.

What I am finding, though, as a new digital librarian, that our work is still ignorable and invisible. The reasons for this might seem contradictory. One, the digital library is not traditional library work and is seen as outside of the realm of the library’s scope. On the other hand, the internet and technology is ubiquitous which makes the behind the scenes work expected and ingrained with very little work assumed, with high levels of integration and low levels of recognition. Ubiquity, while central to our digital lives, is, perhaps, the most difficult thing to overcome. When user expect things to be there, or that the digital world should just exist around them, it is difficult to ask for their patience or their work in helping build the digital world in the library.

Abbot and Costello Meet the Invisible Man Wikimedia Commons

And yet we need their input and their work to makes ours possible.

This tug and pull, the pressure to remain a stable part of the institution’s traditional academic world, maintaining print collections and special collections materials and being part of the on campus classroom, while being forced to compete with the google and the always on internet is difficult for our libraries to prosper. The ironic thing being: the better we do at our jobs the less visible we are and vice versa.

Take it from this excellent Futurama episode “Godfellas” 2002 where “the God Entity” explains the realities of omnipresence to Bender:

While the trend towards digital helps libraries stay relevant in this age the difficulty remains in how this information is presented. The same Ithaka report from above continues that, “Libraries are also challenged in a dramatic way to deal with the demands of our users as technology allows them to gain access to information directly rather than without any intermediation from us.”

Unfortunately, intermediation is the only way we are visible to some, and often that comes at the expense of our users. Users want the system to be there without having to feel like they are using the system. Because of google, our faculty and student expect that our services to be available always with little thought to the infrastructures that make it possible. Only when the curtain is pulled back is the process unveiled, usually with disastrous consequences.

If the institutional repository, the center of my work, works as it should, where materials are preserved and promoted with little to zero effort given on the part of individual faculty there is no one to complain or question its existence. This requires the input and the collaboration with faculty across the university. Proving that their buy in is difficult when some search engines make visibility so seamless. As a result, I often tout the visibility of the Institutional Repository in search engines like Google Scholar to show that it is “working.” The same thing exists on the technical end, if our online catalog bridges the gap seamlessly between physical location and online direction, then no one chats to complain they can’t find a book. That book, found via the Online Catalog, is retrieved with very little noise aside from the ding of the barcode scanner.

Only when things are visibly broken does our work become a point of either discussion or contention.But how then do we talk about our roles in the larger campus community if our work is largely behind the scenes?

In someways, we are forced to tell our stories to our Deans and Provosts about what we do for the library and the institution. This can be done in a number of ways, and best practices have yet to be fully established. The Digital Library Federation’s Assessment Interest group is focused on how we can assess the work that we do.

We can count the amount of money that we bring in during digitization projects or we can measure the encounters and shares as part of larger schemas of impact for promotion and tenure purposes. There are great guides to Google Analytics and Altmetrics through the DLF assessment, but this is reactive instead of proactive. And requires us to justify our existence through outside tools and after things have been posted, not to prove why the initial work is necessary.

Just as the traditional library has been praised for its collections used to foster learning and scholarship, the digital library must be used to show its importance to the larger campus. This goes beyond showing the web analytical impact, but by showing the use of the materials by people on campus. As I wrote in my piece on the library as more than a mausoleum, it is the use of materials that will save us from irrelevancy and invisibility.

There is no simple solution, but a first step is often telling our own story apart from the rest of the library. Perhaps we should be making the case in a way that shows the seams that hold the digital library together with the campus is the way to go. We should use opportunities where ubiquity gives our campus partners feelings that we’ll always be there to tell our story and look for partners. Our seams show not where we are stretched to the limit or where we lack; but where our institutional and collaborative partners can build a larger and better digital community.

We will never have ALL the answers to what our community will need tomorrow In our stories we should acknowledge both our failures and our successes and what we need to prosper in addition to build on our successes. We should show the people behind the curtain that make the easy to use interfaces and search functions work well, and increase the stake that our users play in decisions.

Digital collections are unique in our library world. Outreach, like social media or regular media, can put objects at the forefront of the infrastructure and makes it all the more likely for our users to think of us when they think about the library, but it is the structure itself that often needs visibility and part of the narrative. Without this narrative, without selling the good that we do behind the scenes, our value is lost in a sea of other sources of information. The resources do not just appear because there is work done to make them available. It is time that we start making that visible.

Indies, Vanity, and Predators: Helping Faculty and Students Find Publishers

How many times have you or your faculty received this message?

Dear Dr. Colleague,

We at Intellectual and Smart Publishers would love to talk to you about publishing “INSERT PAPER TITLE HERE” in our issue of Smart Things in Science. We offer expedited review!

So and So,

Intellectual and Smart Publishers

When the Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education approached “Authority is constructed” little did we know the importance that our work would play in ongoing discussions on the national level about “fake news.” But the contextual and constructed nature of information was given a deeper hold within our field with news of the shut down of notorious Beall’s List. The list, which black-listed publishers deemed by Beall as predatory, was a tool which I used (with a necessary grain of salt) to counsel faculty and student interested in publishing their work. Beall’s enemies, and there were many, celebrated while his supporters, again many, wondered about how libraries and librarians will spread the news about the predators in our wake without his list.

How do we define predatory publishers? Predatory publishers (or vanity publishers as they were once known) are publishers with very little, if any, editing or peer review process. Maura Smale wrote a piece several years ago responding to an uptick of press about predatory open access publishers. Any presenter at any national conference will know these predators as their form letters seek to publish your presentations often without knowledge of what you even spoke about. They tout “expedited publishing process” and high impact values, while giving very little in return for your investment of dollars for publishing. Slate writer Joseph Stromberg has an excellent piece on publishing his thesis with a notorious publisher.

Writing in 1958, Howard A Sullivan explained that “the very use of the term vanity publishing implies contempt for the book produced and a judgement on the author and publisher—on the former because he has chosen an unorthodox way of attempting to achieve a recognition his talent does not merit, and on the latter because he has pandered to another’s weakness for his own profit.” (Sullivan, Howard A. “Vanity press publishing.” Library Trends 7, no. 1 (1958): 105-115. )

Weakness is an incredibly loaded term, but we are naturally suspicious of the merit of books published under such circumstances and of the scholar themselves for their unwillingness to be judged by a jury of their peers. Would books published this way merit publishing through traditional processes? Perhaps but also perhaps not.

Overwhelmingly, these predatory publishers target our most vulnerable university community members, who are driven to “publish or perish” to continue the cliché. (Lud?k Brož, Tereza Stöckelová, Filip Vostal do a nice overview of “bloodsuckers” in publishing) Students and new faculty are often pressured to publish at any cost and these emails fill that need to publish anywhere and everywhere. Yet, we know that Howard Sullivan’s view is the norm rather than an exception; the scholar caught publishing without peer-review is scorned in the university community.

A quick search online for “vanity press” or “predatory publisher” and “tenure” see many a frustrated new academic weighing the decisions between not publishing and publishing with a less desirable press. Karen Kelsky, the “professor is in” advice columnist, has approached this topic several times. Summing up that “Putting a book out with an obscure press is not much different than having no book out at all, in terms of gaining a tenure track job or tenure.” (http://theprofessorisin.com/2012/09/21/does-the-status-of-the-press-matter/) While not specifically talking about vanity presses, but merely unknown presses, it is clear that the quality of the press is a significant focus of tenure committees and the angst of new professors.

So, what can Libraries do?

If anything, this is an information literacy issue. Determining which presses are worthy of your work is something that should be taught in new faculty seminars by librarians whose expertise in the fields of publishing should help guide those led astray. Just as how we feel condescending when we teach searching to our students, it will feel just the same, if not worse, when teaching faculty where to publish. Teaching how we determine the value of information (another hallmark of the 2016 framework) will help our faculty in choosing where to publish, and in the end make them more successful in their career. Even if we assume that our colleagues in faculty positions are experts in their fields and highly educated, the intersection of need to publish and the predatory nature of these publishers “tricks” even the most brilliant into giving their work to them. But the researcher is not the only one tricked by these publishers.

The other thing we should consider is who buys these materials. I’m sorry to say that the primary purchasers of these books are libraries, given their price and often microscopic academic viewpoints. We might be the only institutions or persons capable of purchasing such expensive books. We must make an effort from a collection development standpoint to not purchase these books for our collections. In the past month or so I’ve worked with our collection development experts to create policies to prevent Utah State University from purchasing books from suspected predators.

There is a huge problem in proclamations like this because the disgust over predatory publishers and vanity presses bleeds into ongoing discussions over the merits of indie publishers and self-publishing. Self-publishing and indie publishing are not straight line indications of lower quality or predatory materials, but it is often difficult to see the differences. In an account of self-publishing in OCLC records, Juris Dilevko and Keren Dali write, “as large mainstream publishers become focused on profit-and-loss statistics (Schiffrin, 2000) and as the demands of bookstores stoke the corporate emphasis on bestsellers (Epstein, 2001), librarians should remember that self-publishers often release titles that would not typically find a home with a profit-oriented publisher. Self-publishers may be one of the last frontiers of true independent publishing.” (Dilevko, Juris, and Keren Dali. “The self-publishing phenomenon and libraries.” Library & information science research 28, no. 2 (2006): 208-234.) This complicates an already muddled picture of what a library should collect; where questions of authority and how to deem a book worthy of our dwindling dollars, are becoming more and more difficult.

If faculty ask students to use peer-reviewed sources, should we not ask the same for the books we purchase? The end result would be a world devoid of the divergent voices that appear in indie and self publishing, yet save us from the troubles caused by predatory and vanity presses. A policy, perhaps, where fiction from self-publishing is acceptable but non-fiction is unacceptable? A change in how we value information and published works is in order, yet who will lead that charge?

There are no concrete solutions to these issues, but I know if I need to publish on it I’ve already got several offers.