Scholarly Communications

The Time is Now: Scholarly Communication and Undergraduates

“Open Access empowers all scholars, not just those with a Ph.D appended to their last names.”

~char booth, open access as pedagogy

Several recent developments in the scholarly communication world have left the future feeling bleak. An April news piece in Science concluded that millions of pirated papers continue to be downloaded from Sci-Hub. The piece states that for access or convenience (or both), “[o]ver the 6 months leading up to March, Sci-Hub served up 28 million documents” for researchers around the globe (para 6). Some of the papers downloaded were open access, with more than 4,000 papers available from PLoS. Even more surprisingly, “some of the most intense use of Sci-Hub appears to be happening on the campuses of U.S. and European universities” (para 10).

Let me be clear: I believe that Sci-Hub and the work that Alexandra Elbakyan is doing is imperative and eye-opening (if for no other reason than that it “has hastened the speed and vigor of [the OA] conversation.”) But I wanted to share two immediate, visceral reactions that I had to these findings. The first is that this is undeniably an indictment of current library systems and how functional and accessible they are to our users, particularly if those that already have access through their library databases and Interlibrary Loan still prefer using Sci-Hub. The second, which is perhaps more important, is that this will have repercussions with vendors. Last open access week, our library hosted two showings of “The Internet’s Own Boy,” which is a documentary about Aaron Swartz’s life and work. One of the people interviewed for the documentary talked a bit about “underground” or illegal movements. This person expressed that they are important and even central to progress (particularly when all legal routes have been exhausted) but that they can inhibit the legal, mainstream progress that is in motion.* I have to wonder how strict vendors will be in the future in an effort to shut Sci-Hub—and sharing—down.

Since the Science article was published, more has happened. It is difficult to say if these developments are a direct result of the Sci-Hub findings or simply part of vendors’ constant quest to create more revenue. In May, Kevin Smith published a blog post entitled “Tightening their Grip.” In the post, he discusses publishers ever-growing control over access to scholarship, including Wiley’s “control over the pre-peer review copy of scholarly manuscripts” (para 2). He ends the post by discussing Elsevier’s purchase of SSRN and their interest in data on scholars’ behavior and impact. Last week, Phil Davis wrote about two-step authentication and its possible repercussions for Sci-Hub. I would add that this addresses my first reaction—this could potentially make library systems even less intuitive for our users (which, in turn, makes Sci-Hub even more attractive!).

I hope I’ve made it clear that it’s incredibly messy. Yet, while all of this happens—we see more evidence that our students are using Sci-Hub and we watch Elsevier continue to acquire more pieces of scholarly workflow and the scholarly communication system—it becomes more and more evident to me that librarians are missing an important opportunity.

Most of our efforts to move the system closer to openness seem to focus on helping faculty understand the importance and impact of making their work open. This is a start but it is clear that out of all of the populations that the library engages, this group has perhaps the most developed and ingrained practices for sharing their work. I’m not implying that we shouldn’t try to work with faculty. But I am asserting that we aren’t doing enough to engage graduate students and undergraduate students. Yes, you read that right. Undergraduate students.

In 2010, Warren and Duckett claimed that undergraduate students “largely remain excluded” from scholarly communication outreach (pg. 352). While their article started a conversation and Davis-Kahl and Hensley have added to it, I believe that we haven’t come far enough. Amy Mark has written that “[b]ecause of how knowledge and expertise are arranged in the academy, there is little trust in the student voice” (pg. 5).

Even with more of an emphasis on the “student as creator” in library discourse, our outreach seems to reflect this claim. We seem to question whether undergraduates will be able to engage with the complexities of access or even care about the economics of scholarship. By doing this, we’re shortchanging our students, compromising their ability to be truly information literate, and impeding the greater open access movement. Introducing undergraduate students to the complexities of access and scholarly communication can make them more informed authors, information consumers, and future advocates for open access. Stephanie Davis-Kahl (2012) adds,

Asking students to consider if and how they want their own work to be shared and used by others shifts the nature of discussions from cautionary and reactive to reflective and proactive, and explicitly acknowledges that the students’ work is valued enough to be shared if they choose. (pg. 213; emphasis mine)

At my own institution, students get scholarly communication. I don’t mean that they understand the cost of information, how and why they can access it (more on this later), or the stakeholders in the scholarly communication system. I mean that they get the root of scholarly communication—that the point is to share so that knowledge can progress. As an example, in our college’s newspaper, The Davidsonian, there is a section called “The Yowl.” This satirical section pokes fun at the quirks of Davidson College and the greater Davidson community. Some of the satirical section headings have included “Davidson Creates New Interdisciplinary ‘Undecided’ Major” and “Local First Grader to Allow ‘Unsatisfactory’ Report Card Grade to Haunt Him for the Rest of His Life.” In the April 2016 issue, one of the headings read, “Student Excited for Thesis to Collect Dust in Dark Corner of the Library.”

I know that this is meant to humorous. But I also think that it is telling. Students understand that their work has to be shared to have an impact. Though they might not be able to articulate it, they might even be frustrated with the library’s inability to give them a mechanism to share their work widely through an institutional repository. They spend hours and hours of their time researching and writing important, original research and they don’t have an avenue to see this research have an impact in the world. Someone has to ILL the print copy of their thesis from us to even read it! As I think about this, I’m reminded of what a faculty member that I admire once said to me: “Davidson students’ work is too good to be sitting in a drawer somewhere. We have to share it.”

And while they get the root of why scholarly communication is important, so many of our students don’t understand how and why access happens. A few weeks ago, my colleagues Cara Evanson, James Sponsel, and I presented at Library Instruction West. We talked about an assessment we created last year that utilized case studies to better understand students’ misconceptions and understandings of the research process. One of our most important findings was that our students didn’t understand the complexities of access. I presented this finding by using the following slide, which is composed of student quotes. All of the quotes are from incoming Davidson students who were asked to evaluate at least two case studies, one of which describes a researcher hitting a paywall:

Students didn’t understand that non-scholarly information, like articles in the New York Times, can also live behind paywalls. They didn’t understand the limitations set by copyright and what that means for access. They didn’t even understand why someone might have to pay for information or, surprisingly, that some people just can’t afford to pay for information. I know that this might appear to reflect poorly on our students. I would argue that this is just as much a reflection of librarians.

These students have presumably accessed subscription-based content, possibly with the help of a librarian. But no one ever explained to them why they could access the content, who couldn’t access the content, what that meant for progress and knowledge creation, and what their role in all of this was. Do we systematically explain to students that they will lose access when they graduate? Many of them might be using Sci-Hub right now. Do we even engage them in why Sci-Hub exists? Are we transparent about the role they play in changing the system as an information creator? Don’t we think that their understanding of these systems is central to information literacy?

I’m in the process of co-authoring an article that will present some of the ways we’ve had success in answering these questions at Davidson. I know that I don’t have it all figured yet. But I do know that these questions have to be answered in an institutionally-relevant way. We have to use the context of our specific information literacy programs, missions, workflows, and student bodies to engage these questions on our campuses in a way that makes sense. We have to tailor our programs and outreach to fill this gap.

I also know that this work has to be built upon some basic principles: undergraduate students are legitimate creators of information now. They will be the faculty members, scholars, and citizens of the future. Right now, we meticulously train them to use resources they’ll lose days after they graduate. We’re doing them—and ourselves—a great disservice by not introducing them to the complex, ethical questions surrounding openness.

*I am not critiquing the underground movements both Swartz and Elbakyan have created. It is both shortsighted and privileged to claim that progress can only happen through legal venues. It is outside the scope of this post to get into the complexities of ethics and progress but others have started to speak publicly about this. See John Sherer on our collective needs (last paragraph), Kevin Smith on malum prohibitum and malum in se, and Carolyn Gardner on libraries’ complex position.

Why I’m Not In The Mood To Celebrate Open Access Week

It’s Open Access Week, a time to “present the individual and collective benefits of free online access to research”. It’s a time to celebrate the many accomplishments and progress made on the scholarly communications front. And some of those accomplishments are indeed significant: SPARC; OA resolutions at a growing number of institutions; NIH policy requiring the public sharing of taxpayer-paid research; the possibilities for FRPPA; expanding numbers of open access journals; a growing number of fringe faculty who are speaking up about the inequities and failures of the current journal publishing system. There is some cause for optimism. There’s a lot going on this week based on my visit to the OA Week site. You can even buy an OA t-shirt.

So excuse me if I’m not in the mood to celebrate. I’m feeling frustrated. What else can you feel when the system is broken, you know that system must change, but there is little incentive for those perpetuating the system to change it for the better. This might be the first time I’ve posted about scholarly publishing (I have shared thoughts about the textbook publishing system here). Scholarly communications is in my current work portfolio and I take it seriously. But it is one small part of a much larger set of responsibilities for projects and initiatives across the spectrum of public, research and instruction services. So I’m hardly an expert, and compared to others I haven’t the time to dive deeply into all the issues and conversation. At best, I’m simply on the front lines trying to promote new possibilities in scholarly communications.

A few months ago I visited colleagues at another ARL library. At some point the conversation got around to scholarly communications and open access. I asked what they were working on, and how they were trying to create change on their campus. The response was something along the lines of “We tried all that a few years ago, and quite honestly none of our faculty showed any interest in changing their scholarly publishing behaviors. So now we’re just putting our energy elsewhere. When they are ready to change we’ll be here waiting to support them”. I wonder how many others have reached the same point.

To better understand our academic departments and their needs, I have an ongoing project of visiting department chairs (a few each semester). We simply have a discussion about their department, the library and how we might better serve their faculty and students. Our head of reference and instruction attends as well as the librarian who is the liaison to the department. Sometimes the chair invites other faculty or possibly a student to attend and participate. It is always a good conversation, and we learn quite a bit from each other. But when the conversation invariably turns to scholarly communications, I tend to feel more like a traveling salesmen speaking to a potential customer who really wants to get away from me. I wouldn’t even dare show my faculty colleagues something like this – as helpful as it may be – for fear of never being taken seriously again.

The good news is that most of the chairs and faculty I encounter are aware of the open access movement. Most aren’t really paying it much attention. I bring up the benefits, talk up the importance of public access – and remind them about our own walled garden. No one is opposed to open access publishing, they just don’t want to be the ones doing it. As I’ve now heard more than once, “I’m all for providing public access to my research, but what matters most – more than the possibility of thousands of hits on Google – is knowing that the 200 people that matter the most in my discipline read my article in our most prestigious journal – and that’s not going to happen if I publish in an open access journal in my field.” They also remind me that our institution’s tenure and merit process are quite clear about the importance of publishing in top tier, high attention-attracting journals.

I know there are some interesting new ideas about open access floating around out there, and Barbara mentions some of them here. Dorothea Salo shares some as well in an informative podcast interview with Roy Tennant. For much of the conversation Salo expresses her frustration with our lack of progress in creating change. Some things are beyond our control, but in other ways we can do better. For example, she says that we are at fault for poor communication that fails to make faculty aware of “the very real inequities and difficulties that their own behaviors cause.” Well, when I try do that I hit the brick wall of having faculty point at the current system, and acknowledging that it may be broken but they don’t want to be the ones to change it because it will potentially cost them their chance at tenure, a thousand dollar merit increase or a promotion to a more prestigious university. The Tennant-Salo interview ends on a more hopeful note with Salo seeing some signs that higher education (faculty bloggers, the occasional essay in IHE or the Chronicle) is starting to question the current system. I am feeling less optimistic.

These ideas are worth reading and thinking about, but any new ideas for fixing the broken publishing system must take into account the disciplinary prestige factor. If it fails to provide an adequate substitute for it, then the majority of faculty will not buy into that new system. My hope now is that the best prospects for widespread change in the scholarly publishing world will have to wait until the current crop of millennial students are the dominant faculty. I have to believe the current generation of college students, with their better grasp of a social Internet, will refuse to support our current closed system. The other scenario for change is something we recently had a glimpse of in this article that discussed the impact of shrinking library budgets on scientists’ access to the journal literature. When our academic libraries no longer have the funding to sustain the current system, except perhaps for the few elite institutions that could afford it, faculty may then take notice that the current system is broken. They may then be motivated to accept that an open access journal could meet their need for prestige and merit.

I find all this particularly frustrating because I am a believer in the power of design thinking to help us come up with solutions to what is referred to as a wicked problem – something with no obvious or possible solution because the problem is ambiguous and shifting in nature. In an essay I wrote about design thinking I used the scholarly communications crisis as my example of the wicked problem and how we needed to turn option A and option B – neither of which solves the problem – into the more workable option C (a process referred to Roger Martin as “integrative thinking“). But I fail to see how even a design thinking approach can get us out of the scholarly publishing mess if the players in the system, as currently structured, mostly fail to acknowledge that we’ve got a wicked problem. In order for a design thinking approach to work we need to agree that there is a problem, and then we can begin to go through the process to identify a solution. I continue to get the old “it is what it is” response, as if this is the way it has to be and there are no possible solutions worth exploring.

Despite my current frustrations over the difficulty in getting faculty excited about the possibilities for change in scholarly publishing I’m not about to give up on it entirely. That’s not just because it’s part of my job, but I inherently believe it’s the right position to take on the issues. I hope that when I next post about scholarly communications I’ll have more reason to get in the spirit of Open Access Week.

Digital Scholarship Reconsidered

In 1990 Ernest Boyer made an important contribution to the literature of higher education by authoring the book Scholarship Reconsidered: Priorities of the Professoriate. Boyer’s material was based on the results of a 1989 survey of faculty across the nation sponsored by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Boyer said we must “…break out of the tired old teaching versus research debate and define, in more creative ways, what it means to be a scholar”. He described four types of scholarship in order to expand higher education’s thinking about what it meant to produce scholarly work; it needn’t be defined only by scholarly monographs or publications in high-impact peer review journals. Boyer suggested that teaching, application, and integration (of existing knowledge) could be as important to the advancement of knowledge and higher eduction as the scholarship of discovery. While Boyer’s work is considered a classic of higher education literature and is essential reading for academic librarians, the ideas in the book never really had much of an impact – at least not in the ways for which Boyer had hoped. Instead the academic community, has for the most part, stayed true to its one narrow vision of scholarship – the scholary journal article or book.

Fast foward to 2008. A new report by the Ithaka Group explores how faculty make use of digital scholarly resources for their research, and some of these resources expand the notion of the phrase “scholarly resource.” In the report Current Models of Digital Scholarly Communication authors Nancy Maron and Kirby Smith explore the range of digital resources being used by scholars for their research. These resources include e-only journals, data, blogs, and discussion forums. About blogs, the report says they are “being put to interesting use by scholars.” Blogs can contribute to scholarship by providing a forum for discussion. They let scholars share new research findings, and commentary can help shape or refine these new ideas. But their informality is also a weakness for true scholarly communication, as complete quality control is neither completely possible nor desirable. Still, blogs offer perhaps the lowest cost model for allowing (fast) scholarly communication. The tension between control/review and openess/informality will continue to challenge the ability of digital resources like blogs or scholarly social networks to obtain credibility as scholarly publications.

That many of the digitial publications covered in the report are not yet accepted as scholary resources is perhaps a benefit to academic libraries. That’s not to say this content isn’t valuable, but just imagine libraries having to take ownership of these digital scholarly resources. We have barely begun to figure out how to preserve e-journals or store and make accessible e-science data sets. Just try to envision our profession coming up with efficient mechanisms for the tracking, storage and preservation of the contents of blogs or scholarly social networks? Would we be up to the challenge? But before we need to cross that bridge the report suggests another role for academic librarians. The report says “By sharing knowledge about independent digital scholarly resources with faculty…librarians can help promote high-quality projects and build the audience for these resources.” While preservation is a challenge, for now the focus needs to be engaging our faculty in the possibility that scholarship could be broadened to allow for new definitions of scholarly resources in the rapidly expanding digital landscape. Who’s going to go first?