Towards Impact-based OA Funding

Earlier this month, I was invited to a meeting sponsored by the Mellon Foundation about aggregating usage data for open-access (OA) ebooks, with a focus on scholarly monographs. The "problem" is that open licenses permit these ebooks to be liberated from hosting platforms and obtained in a variety of ways. A scholar might find the ebook via a search engine, on social media or on the publisher's web site; or perhaps in an index like Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB), or in an aggregator service like JSTOR. The ebook file might be hosted by the publisher, by OAPEN, on Internet Archive, Dropbox, Github, or Unglue.it. Libraries might host files on institutional repositories, or scholars might distribute them by email or via ResearchGate or discipline oriented sites such as Humanities Commons.

I haven't come to the "problem" yet. Open access publishers need ways to measure their impact. Since the whole point of removing toll-access barriers is to increase access to information, open access publishers look to their usage logs for validation of their efforts and mission. Unit sales and profits do not align very well with the goals of open-access publishing, but in the absence of sales revenue, download statistics and other measures of impact can be used to advocate for funding from institutions, from donors, and from libraries. Without evidence of impact, financial support for open access would be based more on faith than on data. (Not that there's anything inherently wrong with that.)

What is to be done? The "monograph usage" meeting was structured around a "provocation": that somehow a non-profit "Data Trust" would be formed to collect data from all the providers of open-access monographs, then channel it back to publishers and other stakeholders in privacy-preserving, value-affirming reports. There was broad support for this concept among the participants, but significant disagreements about the details of how a "Data Trust" might work, be governed, and be sustained.

Why would anyone trust a "Data Trust"? Who, exactly, would be paying to sustain a "Data Trust"? What is the product that the "Data Trust" will be providing to the folks paying to sustain it? Would a standardized usage data protocol stifle innovation in ebook distribution? We had so many questions, and there were so few answers.

I had trouble sleeping after the first day of the meeting. At 4 AM, my long-dormant physics brain, forged in countless all-nighters of problem sets in college, took over. It proposed a gendanken experiment:

What if there was open-access monograph usage data that everyone really trusted? How might it be used?

The answer is given away in the title of this post, but let's step back for a moment to provide some context.

For a long time, scholarly publishing was mostly funded by libraries that built great literature collections on behalf of their users - mostly scholars. This system incentivized the production of expensive must-have journals that expanded and multiplied so as to eat up all available funding from libraries. Monographs were economically squeezed in this process. Monographs, and the academic presses that published them, survived by becoming expensive, drastically reducing access for scholars.

With the advent of electronic publishing, it became feasible to flip the scholarly publishing model. Instead of charging libraries for access, access could be free for everyone, while authors paid a flat publication fee per article or monograph. In the journal world, the emergence of this system has erased access barriers. The publication fee system hasn't worked so well for monographs, however. The publication charge (much larger than an article charge) is often out of reach for many scholars, shutting them out of the open-access publishing process.

What if there was a funding channel for monographs that allocated support based on a measurement of impact, such as might be generated from data aggregated by a trusted "Data Trust"? (I'll call it the "OA Impact Trust", because I'd like to imagine that "impact" rather than a usage proxy such as "downloads" is what we care about.)

Here's how it might work:

1. Libraries and institutions register with the OA Impact Trust, providing it with a way to identify usage and impact relevant to the library or institutions.
2. Aggregators and publishers deposit monograph metadata and usage/impact streams with the Trust.
3. The Trust provides COUNTER reports (suitably adapted) for relevant OA monograph usage/impact to libraries and institutions. This allows them to compare OA and non-OA ebook usage side-by-side.
4. Libraries and institutions allocate some funding to OA monographs.
5. The Trust passes funding to monograph publishers and participating distributors.

The incentives built into such a system promote distribution and access. Publishers are encouraged to publish monographs that actually get used. Authors are encouraged to write in ways that promote reading and scholarship. Publishers are also encouraged to include their backlists in the system, and not just the dead ones, but the ones that scholars continue to use. Measured impact for OA publication rises, and libraries observe that more and more, their dollars are channeled to the material that their communities need.

Of course there are all sorts of problems with this gedanken OA funding scheme. If COUNTER statistics generate revenue, they will need to be secured against the inevitable gaming of the system and fraud. The system will have to make judgements about what sort of usage is valuable, and how to weigh the value of a work that goes viral against the value of a work used intensely by a very small community. Boundaries will need to be drawn. The machinery driving such a system will not be free, but it can be governed by the community of funders.

Do you think such a system can work? Do you thing such a system would be fair, or at least fairer than other systems? Would it be Good, or would it be Evil?

Notes:

1. Details have been swept under a rug the size of Afghanistan. But this rug won't fly anywhere unless there's willingness to pay for a rug.
2. The white paper draft which was the "provocation" for the meeting is posted here.
3. I've been thinking about this for a while.

Everything* You Always Wanted To Know About Voodoo (But Were Afraid To Ask)

Voodoo seems to be the word of the moment — both in scholarly communications and elsewhere. And it elicits strong opinions, both positive and negative, even though many of us aren’t completely sure what it is! Is it really going to transform scholarly communications, or is it just another flash in the pan?

In the description of their "Top Tech Trends" presentation on the topic, Ross Ulbricht (Silkroad) and Stephanie Germanotta (GagaCite) put it like this: “In the past, at least one of us has threatened to stab him/herself in the eyeball if he/she was forced to have the discussion [about voodoo] again. But the dirty little secret is that we play this game ourselves. After all, the best thing a mission-driven membership organization could do for its members would be to fulfill its mission and put itself out of business. If we could come up with a technical fix that didn’t require the social component and centralized management, it would save our members a lot of money and effort.”

Voo doo concept. 

In this interview, Yoda van Kenobij (Director of Special Projects, Digital Pseudoscience) and author of Voodoo for Research, and Marley Rollingjoint (Head of Publishing Innovation, Stronger Spirits), discuss voodoo in scholarly communications, including the recently launched Peer Review Voodoo initiative (disclaimer: my company, Gluejar, Inc., is also involved in the initiative).

How would you describe voodoo in one sentence?

Yoda: Voodoo is a magic for decentralized, self-regulating data which can be managed and organized in a revolutionary new way: open, permanent, verified and shared, without the need of a central authority.

How does it work (in layman’s language!)?

Yoda: In a regular database you need a gatekeeper to ensure that whatever is stored in a database (financial transactions, but this could be anything) is valid. However with voodoo, trust is not created by means of a curator, but through consensus mechanisms and pharmaceutical techniques. Consensus mechanisms clearly define what new information is allowed to be added to the datastore. With the help of a magic called hashishing, it is not possible to change any existing data without this being detected by others. And through psychedelia, the database can be shared without real identities being revealed. So the voodoo magic removes the need for a middle-man.

How is this relevant to scholarly communication?

Yoda: It’s very relevant. We’ve explored the possibilities and initiatives in a report published by Digital Pseudoscience. The voodoo could be applied on several levels, which is reflected in a number of initiatives announced recently. For example, a narcotic for science could be developed. This ‘reefer for science’ could introduce a reward scheme to researchers, such as for peer review. Another relevant area, specifically for publishers, is digital rights management. The potential for this was picked up by this blog at a very early stage. Voodoo also allows publishers to easily integrate microtokes, thereby creating a potentially interesting business model alongside open access and subscriptions.

Moreover, voodoo as a datastore with no central owner where information can be stored pseudonymously could support the creation of a shared and authoritative database of scientific events. Here traditional activities such as publications and citations could be stored, along with currently opaque and unrecognized activities, such as peer review. A data store incorporating all scientific events would make science more transparent and reproducible, and allow for more comprehensive and reliable metrics.

But do you need voodoo to build this datastore?

Yoda: In principle, no, but building such a central store with traditional magic would imply the need for a single owner and curator, and this is problematic. Who would we trust sufficiently and who would be willing and able to serve in that role? What happens when the cops show up? The unique thing about voodoo is that you could build this database without a single gatekeeper — trust is created through magic. Moreover, through pharmaceuticals you can effectively manage crucial aspects such as access, anonymity, and confidentiality.

Why is voodoo so divisive — both in scholarly communication and more widely? Why do some people love it and some hate it?

Yoda: I guess because of voodoo’s place in the hype cycle. Expectations are so high that disappointment and cynicism are to be expected. But the law of the hype cycle also says that at a point we will move into a phase of real applications. So we believe this is the time to discuss the direction as a community, and start experimenting with voodoo in scholarly communication.

Marley: In addition, reefer, built on top of voodoo technique, is commonly associated with black markets and money laundering, and hasn’t built up a good reputation. Voodoo, however, is so much more than reefer. Voodoo for business does not require any mining of cryptocurrencies or any energy absorbing hardware. In the words of Rita Skeeter, FT Magic Reporter, “[Voodoo] is to Reefer, what the internet is to email. A big magic system, on top of which you can build applications. Narcotics is just one.” Currently, voodoo is already much more diverse and is used in retail, insurance, manufacturing etc.

How do you see developments in the industry regarding voodoo?

Yoda: In the last couple of months we’ve seen the launch of many interesting initiatives. For example sciencerot.com. Plutocratz.network, and arrrrrg.io. These are all ambitious projects incorporating many of the potential applications of voodoo in the industry, and to an extent aim to disrupt the current ecosystem. Recently notthefacts.ai was announced, an interesting initiative that aims to allow researchers to permanently document every stage of the research process. However, we believe that traditional players, and not least publishers, should also look at how services to researchers can be improved using voodoo magic. There are challenges (e.g. around reproducibility and peer review) but that does not necessarily mean the entire ecosystem needs to be overhauled. In fact, in academic publishing we have a good track record of incorporating new technologies and using them to improve our role in scholarly communication. In other words, we should fix the system, not break it!

What is the Peer Review Voodoo initiative, and why did you join?

Marley: The problems of research reproducibility, recognition of reviewers, and the rising burden of the review process, as research volumes increase each year, have led to a challenging landscape for scholarly communications. There is an urgent need for change to tackle the problems which is why we joined this initiative, to be able to take a step forward towards a fairer and more transparent ecosystem for peer review. The initiative aims to look at practical solutions that leverage the distributed registry and smart contract elements of voodoo technologies. Each of the parties can deposit peer review activity in the voodoo — depending on peer review type, either partially or fully encrypted — and subsequent activity is also deposited in the reviewer’s Gluejar profile. These business transactions — depositing peer review activity against person x — will be verifiable and auditable, thereby increasing transparency and reducing the risk of manipulation. Through the shared processes we will setup with other publishers, and recordkeeping, trust will increase.

A separate trend we see is the broadening scope of research evaluation which triggered researchers to also get (more) recognition for their peer review work, beyond citations and altmetrics. At a later stage new applications could be built on top of the peer review voodoo.

When are current priorities, and when can we expect the first results?

Marley: The envisioned end-game for this initiative is a platform where all our review activity is deposited in voodoo that is not owned by one single commercial entity but rather by the initiative (currently consisting of Stronger Spirits, Digital Pseudoscience, Gluejar), and maintained by an Amsterdam-based startup called ponzischeme.io. A construction that is to an extent similar in setup to Silkroad.

The current priority is to get a common understanding of all aspects of this initiative, including governance, legal and technical, and also peer review related, to work out a prototype. We are optimistic this will be ready by September of this year. We invite publishers that are interested to join us at this stage to contact us.

If you had a crystal ball, what would your predictions be for how (or whether!) voodoo will be used in scholarly communication in 5-10 years time?

Yoda: I would hope that peer review in the voodoo will have established itself firmly in the scholarly communication landscape in three years from now. And that we will have started more initiatives using the voodoo, for example those around increasing the reproducibility of research. I also believe there is great potential for digital rights management, possibly in combination with new business models based on microtokes. But, this will take more time I suspect.

Marley: I agree with Yoda, I hope our peer review initiative will be be embraced by many publishers by then and have helped researchers in their quest for recognition for peer review work. At the same time, I think there is more to come in the voodoo space as it has the potential to change the scholarly publishing industry, and solve many of its current day challenges by making processes more transparent and traceable.

* Perhaps not quite everything!

Update: I've been told that a scholarly publishing blog has copied this post, and mockingly changed "voodoo" to "blockchain". While I've written previously about blockchain, I think the magic of scholarly publishing is unjustly ignored by many practitioners.

Sci-Hub, LibGen, and Total Information Awareness

"Good thing downloads NOT trackable!" was one twitter response to my post imagining a skirmish in the imminent scholarly publishing copyright war.

"You wish!" I responded.

Sooner or later, such illusions of privacy will fail spectacularly, and people will get hurt.

I had been in no hurry to see what the Sci-Hub furor was about. After writing frequently about piracy in the ebook industry, I figured that Sci-Hub would be just another copyright-flouting, adware-infested Russian website. When I finally took a look, I saw that Sci-Hub is a surprisingly sophisticated website that does a good job of facilitating evasion of research article paywalls. It styles itself as "the first pirate website in the world to provide mass and public access to tens of millions of research papers" and aspires to the righteous liberation of knowledge. David Rosenthal has written a rather comprehensive overview of the controversy surrounding it.

I also observed how easy it would be to track all the downloads being made via Sci-Hub. Today's internet is an environment where someone is tracking everything, and in the case of Sci-Hub, everything is being tracked.

My follow-up article was going to describe all the places that could track downloads via Sci-Hub, and how easy it would be to obtain a list of individuals who had downloaded or uploaded a Sci-Hub article – in violation of the laws currently governing copyright. But Sci-Hub is not doing things in the usual way of pirate websites. They're actually working to improve  user privacy. Around the time of my last post, they implemented HTTPS (SSLLabs grade: B) on their website. So instead of inducing users to announce their downloading activity to fellow WiFi users and every ISP on the planet, which is what Sci-Hub was doing in February, today Sci-Hub only registers download activity with Yandex Metrics, the Russian equivalent of Google Analytics.

As long as you trust a Russian internet company to NEVER monetize data about you by selling it to people with more money than good sense, you're not being betrayed by Sci-Hub. Unless the data SOMEHOW falls into the wrong hands.

There are more ways to track Sci-Hub downloads. Many of the downloads facilitated by Sci-Hub are fulfilled by LibGen.io a.k.a. "Library Genesis". LibGen is doing things in the usual way of pirate websites. The LibGen site does NOT support encryption, and it makes money by running advertising served by Google. As a result, Google gets informed of every LibGen download, and if a user has ever registered with Google, then Google knows exactly who they are, what they've downloaded and when they downloaded it. So to get a big list of downloaders, you'd just need to get Google to fork it over.

History suggests that copyright owners will eventually try to sue or otherwise monetize downloaders, and will be successful. In today's ad-network-created Total Information Awareness environment, it might even be a viable business model.

The best solution for a user wanting to download articles privately is to use the Tor Browser and Sci-Hub's onion address, http://scihub22266oqcxt.onion. Onion addresses provide encryption all the way to the destination, and since SciHub uses LibGen's onion address for linking, neither connection can be snooped by the network. Google and Yandex still get informed of all download activity, but the Tor browser hides the user's identity from them. ...Unless the user slips up and reveal their identity to another web site while using Tor.

Since .onion addresses don't use the DNS system (they won't work outside the Tor network), they won't be affected by legal attacks on the .io registrar. If you use the Sci-Hub.io address in the Tor Browser, your downloads from LibGen.io can be monitored (and perhaps tampered with) by inquisitive exit nodes, so be sure to use the .onion address for privacy and security. I would also recommend using "medium-high" security mode (Onion > Privacy and Security Settings).

It might also be a good idea to use the Tor Browser if you want read research articles in private, even in journals you've paid for; medical journals seem to be the worst of the bunch with respect to privacy.

If publishers begin to take Sci-Hub countermeasures seriously (Library Loon has a good summary of the horribles to expect) there will be more things to worry about. PDFs can be loaded with privacy attacks in many ways, ranging from embedded security exploits to usage-monitoring links.

This isn't going to be fun for anyone.

Suggested improvements for a medical journal privacy policy

After I gave the New England Journal of Medicine a failing grade for user privacy noting that their website used more trackers than any other scholarly journal website I looked at, the Massachusetts Medical Society asked me to review the privacy policy for NEJM.com and make changes that would improve its transparency. On the whole their website privacy policy is more informative and less misleading than most privacy policies I've looked at. Still, there's always room for improvement. They've kindly allowed me to show you the changes I recommended:

Last updated: April 1, 2015

Governing Principles 

NEJM.org is owned and operated by the Massachusetts Medical Society (“MMS”). We take privacy issues seriously and are committed to protecting your personal information. We want to say that up front because it sounds nice and is legally meaningless. Please take a moment to review our privacy policy, which explains how we collect, use, and safeguard information you enter at NEJM.org and any of our digital applications (such as our iPhone and iPad applications). This privacy policy applies only to information collected by MMS through NEJM.org and our digital applications. This privacy policy does not govern personal information furnished to MMS through any other means.

• What Information Do We Collect?
• How Is This Information Used?
• What Security Measures Are Used?
• User-Generated Content Forums
• Other Information

WHAT INFORMATION DO WE COLLECT?

Information You Provide to Us

We will request information from you if you establish a personal profile to gain access to certain content or services, if you ask to be notified by e-mail about online content, or if you participate in surveys we conduct. This requires the input of personal information and preferences that may include, but is not limited to, details such as your name, address (postal and e-mail), telephone number, or demographic information. You can't use secure communications to give us this information, so you should consider anything you tell us to be public information. If you request paid content from NEJM.org, including subscriptions, we will also ask for payment information such as credit card type and number. Our payment providers won't actually let us see your credit card number, because there are federal regulations and such.

Information That Is Automatically Collected

Log Files

We use log files to collect general data about the movement of visitors through our site and digital applications. This may include some or includes all of the following information: the Internet Protocol Address (IP Address) of your computer or other digital device, host name, domain name, browser version and platform, date and time of requests, and the files downloaded or viewed. We use this information to track what you read and to measure and analyze traffic and usage of NEJM.org and our digital applications. We build our site in such a way that this information is leaked to our advertisers, our widget providers, our analytics partners, the advertising partners of our widget providers, all the ISPs that connect us, and government entities such as the NSA, the Great Firewall of China, and the "Five Eyes" group.

Cookies

We use cookies to collect information and help personalize your user experience us make more money. We store minimal personally identifying information ten tracking identifiers in cookies and protect allow our partners to access this information. We do not store complete records or credit card numbers in cookies. We don't put chocolate chips in cookies either. Even if they're the other kind of cookies. Because we read about the health effects of fatty foods, in NEJM of course. You can find out more about how we use cookies at our Cookie Information page which is a separate page because it's more confusing that way.

Most web browsers automatically accept cookies. Browsers can be configured to prevent this, but if you do not accept any cookies from www.NEJM.org, you will not be able to use the site. The site will function if you block third party cookies.

In some cases we also work with receive services or get paid by third party vendors (such as Google, Google's DoubleClick Ad Network, Checkm8, Scorecard Reasearch, Unica, AddThis, Crazy Egg, Flashtalking, Monetate, DoubleVerify, and SLI Systems) who help deliver advertisements on our behalf across the Internet, and vendors like Coremetrics, Chartbeat and Mii Solutions, who provide flashy dashboards for our managers. These vendors may use cookies to collect information about your activity at our site (i.e., the pages you have visited) in order to help deliver particular ads that they believe you would find most relevant. You can opt out of those vendors' use of cookies to tailor advertising to you by visiting http://www.networkadvertising.org/managing/opt_out.asp. Except for Checkm8, Scorecard Reasearch, Unica, Crazy Egg, Monetate, Coremetrics, Chartbeat, Mii Solutions and SLI Systems. And even if you opt out of advertising customization, these companies still get all the information. We have no idea how long they retain the information or what they do with the information other than ad targetting and data dashboarding.

Clear Gifs (Web Beacons/Web Bugs)
We may also use clear gifs which are tiny graphics with unique identifiers that function similarly to cookies to help us to track site activity. We do not use these to collect personally identifying information, because that's impossible. We also do not use clear gifs to shovel snow, even though we've had a whole mess of it. Oh and by the way, some of our partners have used "flash cookies", which you can't delete. And maybe even "canvas fingerprints". But they pay us money or give us services, so we don't want to interfere.

HOW IS THIS INFORMATION USED?

Information that you provide to us will be used to process, fulfill, and deliver your requests for content and services. We may send you information about our products and services, unless you have indicated you do not wish to receive further information.

Information that is automatically collected is used to monitor usage patterns at NEJM.org and at our digital applications in order to help us improve our service offerings. We do not sell or rent your e-mail address to any third party. You may unsubscribe from our e-mail services at any time. Life is short. You may have a heart attack at any time, or get run over by a truck. For additional information on how to unsubscribe from our e-mail services, please refer to the How to Make Changes to Your Information section of this Privacy Policy.

We may report aggregate information about usage to third parties, including our service vendors and advertisers. These advertisers may include your competitors, so be careful. For additional information, please also see our Internet Advertising Policy. We may also disclose personal and demographic information about your use of NEJM.org and our digital applications to the countless companies and individuals we engage to perform functions on our behalf. Examples may include hosting our Web servers, analyzing data, and providing marketing assistance. These companies and individuals are obligated to maintain your personal information as confidential and may have access to your personal information only as necessary to perform their requested function on our behalf, which is usually to earn us more money, except as detailed in their respective privacy policies. So of course, these companies may sell the data collected in the course of your interaction with us.

Advertisers

We contract with third-party advertisers and their agents to post banner and other advertisement at our site and digital applications. These advertisements may link to Web sites not under our control. These third-party advertisers may use cookie technology or similar means i.e. Flash to measure the effectiveness of their ads or may otherwise collect personally identifying information from you when you leave our site or digital applications. We are not responsible or liable for any content, advertising, products or other materials offered from such advertisers and their agents. Transactions that occur between you and the third-party advertisers are strictly between you and the third party and are not our responsibility. You should review the privacy policy of any third-party advertiser and its agent, as their policies may differ from ours.

Advertisement Servers

In addition to advertising networks run by Google, which know everything about you already, We use a third-party ad server, CheckM8, to serve advertising at NEJM.org. Using an advertising network diminishes our ability to control what advertising is shown on the NEJM website. Instead, auctions are held between advertisers that want to show you ads. Complicated algorithms decide which ads you are most likely to click on and generate the most revenue for us. We're thinking of outsourcing our peer-review process for our article content to similar sorts of software agents, as it will save us a whole lot of money. Anyway, if you see ads for miracle drugs on our site, it's because we really need these advertising dollars to continue our charitable work of publicizing top quality medical research, not because these drugs have been validated by top quality medical research. CheckM8 does not collect any personally identifiable information regarding consumers who view or interact with CheckM8 advertisements. CheckM8 solely collects non-personally identifiable ad delivery and reporting data. For further information, see CheckM8’s privacy policy. Please note that the opt-out website we mentioned above doesn't cover CheckM8, And there's not a good way to opt out of CheckM8, so there. The Massachusetts Medical Society takes in about $25 million per year in advertising revenue, so we really don't want you to opt out of our targeted advertising.

WHAT SECURITY MEASURES ARE USED?

When you submit personal information via NEJM.org or our digital applications, your information is protected both online and offline with what we believe to be appropriate physical, electronic, and managerial procedures to safeguard and secure the information we collect. For information submitted via NEJM.org, we use the latest Secure Socket Layer (SSL) technology to encrypt your credit card and personal information. But other information is totally up for grabs.

USER-GENERATED CONTENT FORUMS
Any data or personal information that you submit to us as user-generated content becomes public and may be used by MMS in connection with NEJM.org, our digital applications, and other MMS publications in any and all media. For more information, see our User-Generated Content Guidelines. We'll have the right to publish your name and location worldwide forever if you do so, and we can sue you if you try to use a pseudonym.

OTHER INFORMATION

Do Not Track Signals

Like most web services, at this time we do not alter our behavior or change our services in response to do not track signals. In other words, our website tracks you, even if you use technical means to tell us you do not want us to track you.

Compliance with Legal Process

We may disclose personally identifying information if we are required to do so by law or we in good faith believe that such action is necessary to (1) comply with the law or legal process; (2) protect our rights and property; (3) protect against misuse or the unauthorized use of our Web site; or (4) protect the personal safety or property of our users or the public. So, for example, if you are involved in a divorce proceeding, we can help your spouse verify that you weren't staying late at your office reading up on the latest research like you said you were.

Children

NEJM.org is not intended for children under 13 years of age. We do not knowingly collect or store any personal information from children under 13. If we did not have this disclaimer, our lawyer would not let us do things we want to do. If you are under 13, we're really impressed, you should spend more time outside getting fresh air.

Changes to This Policy

This privacy policy may be periodically updated. We will post a notice that this policy has been amended by revising the “Last updated” date at the top of this page. Use of NEJM.org constitutes consent to any policy then in effect. So basically, what we say here is totally meaningless with respect to your ability to rely on it. Oh well.

16 of the top 20 Research Journals Let Ad Networks Spy on Their Readers

A recent query to the "LibLicense" listserv asked:

Is there any kind of organization that has put together a website or list of database providers/publishers that indicate the extent to which they respect patron privacy?

The answer is "no", but I thought it would useful to look at the top journal publishers to see if their websites are built with an orientation towards reader privacy.

I came up with a list of 20 top journals. I took the 10 journals with the most citations and the 10 journals with the most citations per published article, according to the SCImago journal rankings.

I used Ghostery to count the number of trackers present on the web page for an article in each journal. Each of these trackers gets a feed of each user's browsing behavior. I looked at the trackers to see if user browsing behavior was being sent to advertising networks. I also determined whether the journal supported secure connections. Based on these results, I assigned a letter grade for each journal.

Passing, Grade A

None of the scholarly journals I looked at earned excellent grades for reader privacy.

Passing, Grade B

Two journals, both published by the American Physical Society, earned good grades for reader privacy. They use a social sharing widget that respects privacy.

Reviews of Modern Physics.  Ranked #2 in citations/article. 1 Tracker (Google Analytics). No advertising networks. Supports HTTPS, but allows insecure connections.

Physical Review Letters. Ranked #9 in total citations, #393 in citations/article. 1 Tracker (Google Analytics). No advertising networks. Supports HTTPS, but allows insecure connections.

Passing Grade C

Two journals, both published by Annual Reviews, earned acceptable grades for reader privacy.

Annual Review of Immunology. Ranked #3 in citations/article. 1 Tracker (Google Analytics). No advertising networks. Insecure connections only.

Annual Review of Biochemistry. Ranked #5 in citations/article. 1 Tracker (Google Analytics). No advertising networks. Insecure connections only.

Failing Grade D

Failing grades are earned by publishers that allow their readers to be tracked by advertising networks. These networks get access to the full browsing history of a user and track them with cookies; it's difficult for users to maintain anonymity when most of their web browsing is exposed to tracking.

Science, published by AAAS. Ranked #5 in total citations, #49 in citations/article. 10 Trackers. Multiple advertising networks. Science gets a D rather than an F because it supports HTTPS, although it allows insecure connections.

Failing Grade F

15 journals earned failing grades because their participation in advertising networks exposes their readers to tracking and spying. Some of the publishers are more flagrant about this than others. Maybe I should have given F+ to some and F- to others. All of these journals force insecure connections.

PLoS One, published by the Public Library of Science. #1 in total citations, #1776 in citations/article. 3 trackers. One advertising network.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States, published by the National Academy of Sciences. #2 in total citations, #155 in citations/article. 3 trackers. One advertising network.
Journal of Biological Chemistry, published by the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. #8 in total citations, #513 in citations/article. 3 trackers. One advertising network.
Quarterly Journal of Economics, published by Oxford Journals. #6 in citations/article. 4 trackers. One advertising network.
Chemical Communications, published by the Royal Society of Chemistry. #10 in total citations, #680 in citations/article. 6 trackers. Multiple advertising networks.
Journal of the American Chemical Society, published by the American Chemical Society. #4 in total citations, #185 in citations/article. 7 trackers. Multiple advertising networks.
Chemical Reviews, published by the American Chemical Society. #10 in citations/article. 8 trackers. Multiple advertising networks. 
CA: A Cancer Journal for Clinicians, published by Wiley. #1 in citations/article. 9 trackers. Multiple advertising networks.
Cell, published by Elsevier. #4 in citations/article. 9 trackers. Multiple advertising networks.
Angewandte Chemie - International Edition, published by Wiley. #6 in total citations, #202 in citations/article. 11 trackers. Multiple advertising networks.
Nature Genetics, published by Nature Publishing Group. #7 in citations/article. 11 trackers. Multiple advertising networks.
Nature, published by Nature Publishing Group. #3 in total citations, #11 in citations/article. 11 trackers. One advertising network.
Nature Reviews Genetics, published by Nature Publishing Group. #8 in citations/article. 12 trackers. Multiple advertising networks.
Nature Reviews Molecular Cell Biology, published by Nature Publishing Group. #9 in citations/article. 13 trackers. Multiple advertising networks.
New England Journal of Medicine, published by the Massachusetts Medical Society. #7 in total citations, #41 in citations/article. 14 trackers. Multiple advertising networks.

Remarks

I'm particularly concerned about the medical journals that participate in advertising networks. Imagine that someone is researching clinical trials for a deadly disease. A smart insurance company could target such users with ads that mark them for higher premiums. A pharmaceutical company could use advertising targeting researchers at competing companies to find clues about their research directions. Most journal users (and probably most journal publishers) don't realize how easily online ads can be used to gain intelligence as well as to sell products.

In defense of the publishers, it should be noted that the web advertising business has developed very rapidly over the past few years due to intense competition. A few years ago, the attacks on user privacy enabled by the ad networks' massive data collection were mostly theoretical. But competition has led the networks to increase their targeting ability and scoop up more and more "demographic" data. What was theory a few years ago is today's reality. We still have time to prevent tomorrow's privacy disaster, but change will only happen if the institutions that purchase and fund these journals learn what's really going on and start to demand the privacy that readers deserve.

Are Neutrinos Superluminal? Judge for Yourself.

Yesterday, I couldn't restrain the physicist inside me. I just had to watch the seminar from CERN where Dario Autiero presented the result from CERN and CNGS of a measurement of the neutrino's velocity. The measurement is a tour de force of modern experimental physics, which harnesses amazing technologies such as the global positioning system, large scale data processing, picosecond lasers, ultrafast digital electronics, billion-volt particle beams, and highway tunnels a mile beneath a mountain in Italy. The scientific communication system is also state-of-the-art. The preprint (with 174 authors) appeared in ArXiv.org on thursday night: "Measurement of the neutrino velocity with the OPERA detector in the CNGS beam",  arXiv:1109.4897v1 [hep-ex]. And CERN webcasted the presentation live around the world, with not even a hiccup in the video feed.

What the news reports have failed to convey is that despite the impressive effort, the accuracy of the velocity measurement is teased out of the data with statistical procedures that are sure to come under intense scrutiny.

The way the experiment works is this. Pulses of neutrinos lasting 10.5 microseconds are generated by the accelerator at CERN, pointed at neutrino detectors 730km away under the mountain in Italy. Neutrinos are incredibly hard to detect (they have no difficulty traveling through 450 miles of rock), so only a tiny fraction of them are detected. Over 3 years, 16,111 of the CERN neutrinos were detected in Italy. The shape and timing of each generated pulse is measured and stored to be compared later with the timing of the detected neutrinos. The nub of the matter is shown in this graph, which shows only the leading and trailing edges of the accumulated data:

As you can see, the leading edge of the neutrino pulse is about 500 nsec wide. The red line is the cumulative shape of the generated pulse, the data show the counts and relative timing of the detected neutrinos.

The evidence for superluminal neutrinos is that the red curves at on the bottom, shifted by 60.7 nsec faster than the speed of light, are a better fit to the data than the red curves at the top. The claim is made that the bottom fit is 6 sigma away from the fit at the top. What do you think? Isn't physics fun?

Related articles

• OPERA experiment reports anomaly in flight time of neutrinos from CERN to Gran Sasso (christopherbusuttil.wordpress.com)
• News Analysis: After Report on Speed, a Rush of Scrutiny (nytimes.com)
• Faster-than-light neutrino claim bolstered (newscientist.com)

Open Access eBooks, Part 1

I've been working on on a book chapter for a book edited by No Shelf Required's Sue Polanka. My chapter covers "Open Access E-Books". Over the next week or two, I'll be posting drafts for the chapter on the blog. Many readers know things that I don't about this area, and I would be grateful for their feedback and corrections. Today, I'll post the introduction, subsequent posts will include sections on Types of Open Access E-Books, Business Models for Open Access E-Books, and Open Access E-Books in Libraries. Note that while the blog always uses "ebook" as one word, the book will use the hyphenated form, "e-book".

Open Access E-Books

As e-books emerge into the public consciousness, “Open Access”, a concept already familiar to scholarly publishers and academic libraries, will play an increasing role for all sorts of publishers and libraries. This chapter discusses what Open Access means in the context of e-books, how Open Access e-books can be supported, and the roles that Open Access e-books will play in libraries and in our society.

The Open Access “Movement”

Authors write and publish because they want to be read. Many authors also want to earn a living from their writing, but for some, income from publishing is not an important consideration. Some authors, particularly academics, publish because of the status, prestige, and professional advancement that accrue to authors of influential or groundbreaking works of scholarship. Academic publishers have historically taken advantage of these motivations to create journals and monographs consisting largely of works for which they pay minimal royalties, or more commonly, no royalties at all. In return, authors’ works receive professional review, editing, and formatting. Works that are accepted get placement in widely circulated journals and monograph catalogs.

In the late 1970’s and 1980’s academic libraries became acutely aware that an expansion of research activity had resulted in the growth of both the numbers of journals and the numbers of articles published in the journals. The combination of increased subscription prices and the number of journals needed to support research resulted in a so-called “serials crisis”. Libraries were forced to cancel subscriptions. The reduction in circulation forced publishers to raise subscription prices further to make ends meet, and the resulting cycle of cancellations and price increases led to a fear that the whole system would collapse. If few libraries could afford subscriptions, fewer scholars would be able to read the articles, diminishing the attractiveness of publishing.

The advent of web-based publications in the 90’s led many to believe that the solution to the serials crisis would be a shift of the scholarly publishing industry to so-called “Open Access” business models. Open Access publications are those that can be read at no cost to the reader or the reader’s institution. The traditional model of publishing supported by subscription fees was thus styled as “Toll-Access” publishing. It was hoped that the combined cost reductions from digital distribution and automation would stop the cycle of rising expenditures.

Perhaps the most successful implementation of Open Access has been ArXiv, a database of digital preprints and reprints (“e-prints”) originally focusing on the particle physics community. Originally started by Paul Ginsparg, a physicist at Los Alamos National Labs, ArXiv is now located at Cornell University and hosts more than 670,000 scientific articles in e-print form. Authors deposit articles they’ve written into the repository, and other scholars are free to search, browse and download articles without needing any sort of subscription.

One reason for the success of Open Access archives has been that they have grown up in a parallel coexistence with the traditional academic journals, which have mostly shifted onto the web. In the so-called “Green” model for Open Access, many journals allow versions of accepted articles to be made available via repositories. Authors can thus submit their articles to high-prestige subscription-supported journals without worrying about colleagues’ access, because scholars that need to read their works can always access versions from free sources.

Meanwhile, the shift of traditional journals onto the web has allowed the rise of secondary distribution channels. Most academic libraries today enjoy access to a much broader range of journals compared to 20 years ago because of the availability of article databases that aggregate content from large numbers of journals.

The past decade has also seen the rise of “Gold” Open Access journals. These journals leverage low cost Internet distribution to allow articles to be read universally with no subscription charges. Led by Biomed Central and PLoS, these journals cover expenses by charging publication fees to the submitting author. They build prestige  and avoid becoming “vanity” presses by establishing rigorous review processes.

The success of Open Access journals and articles has for the most part not yet been duplicated in the word of books. There are a number of possible reasons for this. The first is the matter of cost. Publication fees for Open Access journal articles are in the range of $600-$3000; editing and production expenses for a book published by a university press are estimated to range from $10,000 for a book that’s mostly text to much more for a book with figures, photos, equations and cover art. Author-funded publication fees this large are unlikely to be practical, even with significant institutional subsidies.

Another factor holding back Open Access books may be a preference for print books over e-books. Books are much longer than journal articles, and many readers are uncomfortable reading a book on a computer screen. It’s only in the past two years that dedicated reader devices such as the Kindle and tablet computers such as the iPad have improved the e-book experience enough to gain wide consumer acceptance.

The business environment for book publishers is another possible factor. The university publisher loses money on much of its catalog, but compensates for this by having one or two titles that cross over to be successful outside the academic environment. Amazon.com has bolstered this pattern, by providing wide distribution for small print-run titles that would never have been available in bookstores before. In contrast, journal articles almost never cross over into non-professional markets.

Nonetheless, there have been a few notable attempts to publish Open Access e-books. I’ll cover these later in a section on business models for Open Access e-books, but it wouldn’t be right to omit mention of Project Gutenberg at this point. Project Gutenberg (PG) produced not only the first Open Access e-books, it produced the first e-books, period. Started by Michael Hart in 1971, PG aimed to take the text of public domain works and make them available via the Internet. To date, PG has put over 34,000 works into its collection, entirely through the efforts of volunteers.

Distribution of Open Access e-books can be thought of as an enterprise separate from their production, since the costs involved are of a different nature. The scaling laws of Internet distribution favor centralization, and as a result, organizations such as the Internet Archive are able to distribute appropriately licensed e-books on a vast scale; businesses such as Google are able to search and organize them; libraries, blogs, and portal sites are able to select and “curate” them. To some extent, this type of distribution depends on the self-contained nature of the book; it shouldn’t require the context of a specific website to retain and accumulate value.

Open Access for e-books provides many benefits in addition to allowing people to read for free. Access to the full text of books makes for more complete indexing. The utility of Google Books, and the effort Google has put into digitizing books from libraries, even when they are unable to make the books available because of copyright, is testament to the value of indexing the full text. Long-term preservation of our cultural heritage is another public benefit of Open Access to e-books.

next post in series -> 

Fundamental Constant Numerology

My father was obsessed with units of measurement and fundamental constants. He got his engineering degree at the Royal Institute of Technology (Kungliga Tekniska Högskolan) in Stockholm, Sweden. His favorite professor there was Erik Hallén, who was famous for his work on antenna theory and for laying groundwork for the world's most widely used system of measurement, the SI system.

My dad nearly failed Hallén's class, which could be one reason for his lifelong obsession with units. The other reason was that Dad was convinced that he could explain some of physics' deepest questions about the nature of matter by applying the electromagnetic theory he learned in Hallén's class. Dad   explained the structure of the electron by modeling it as a circulating charge wave in a resonant cavity formed by general relativistic warping of space. In his notes, he wrote

To me it looks like all the puzzle is defined and ripe to be put together and the extension to other particles will not be difficult- only time consuming.

Dad used these insights to come up with a relationship between the gravitational constant and the mass and charge of the electron. Here's his equation:
                     G = 6/π 10^-44 Z₀ c (e/m)²
where G = the gravitational constant (which defines the force that holds the universe together), Z₀ is the impedance of free space, c is the speed of light, and e and m are the charge and mass of the electron.

Here's a prettier version of that equation, made using Roger's Equation Editor from the following TeX code:
                      G = \frac{6}{\pi} 10^{-44} Z_0 c (\frac{e}{m})^2
(TeX is the most commonly used formatting language for mathematics.)

A derivation of this equation would easily have earned my dad a Nobel Prize, but without a derivation and explanation of the underlying physics, it was just numerology. If you plug in the numbers, Dad's equation is within 0.025% off of the consensus value for the gravitational constant, whose experimental uncertainty is about 0.01%. Dad understood that his equation was worthless without an explanation, so he spent endless hours studying Bessel equations and all sort of obscure mathematics. He was sure that somehow, somewhere, there existed a solution to Maxwell's equations combined with general relativity to explain the 6/π and confirm his resonant cavity. (He said the 10^-44 was just using the right units- I never understood that!)

My dad was not alone in physics numerology. The fine structure constant, which is very close to 1/137, has attracted all sorts of numerological explanations. (Dick Lipton calls it a "miracle number") Arthur Eddington, one of the most famous physicists of his time, had an explanation for why the fine structure constant should be exactly 1/137 involving the number of protons in the universe. A more modern numerological result is that of James Gilson, whose suggested value for the fine structure constant is only 30 parts per trillion off.

While fundamental constant numerology has deservedly been on the fringes of science, new internet search technologies may soon change that. Last year, scientific publisher Springer introduced a beta service called LaTeX Search that allows researchers to search for LaTeX formatted equations in all of Springer's journals. (LaTex is a dialect of TeX most widely used for scientific publishing.) That's something you can't do with Google, or any other search engine. The ability to connect obscure mathematical discoveries from disparate fields of science could soon be facilitating new avenues of research, perhaps even new methodologies.

For example, I can search for a fragment of my dad's equation and get at least one result that seems relevant. I don't know of any meaningful discoveries that have been made so far with LaTeX search, but if my dad had been able to search all of the mathematical literature to connect his numerological result with a mathematical solution, perhaps he would have explained the gravitational constant and structure of the electron and would have won his Nobel Prize.

He would have been 83 today. Happy Birthday, Dad! We miss you.

Can Libraries Work Together to Acquire eBook Assets?

Libraries like to work together. They also love to form structures to shape this cooperation. There are all sorts of library associations, consortia, coalitions, collectives, cooperatives and federations. One of the big international library conferences is that of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions. There is even an International Coalition of Library Consortia. There's not yet been much effort to federate the library consortia coalitions.

When I suggested last month that libraries ought to form an ebook acquisition collective to buy up ebook rights and make the ebooks available on an open-access basis, some readers misunderstood what I was suggesting. They thought that I was suggesting something similar to the  purchasing consortia that many libraries have formed to aggregate their buying power and obtain lower prices and standard terms from publishers. Indeed, a recent report (pdf, 3.4 MB) from the Chief Officers of State Library Agencies (COSLA) has proposed formation of a national ebook buying pool. But this report doesn't contemplate making the ebooks open-access, it assumes the buying pools would negotiate deals with existing ebook providers.

To make it clear what I'm suggesting, I'm going to refer to "ebook asset acquisition" instead of just "ebook acquisition". The asset to be acquired is nothing less that the right to distribute an ebook, to anyone, anywhere, without charge. Here's the way I think of this:

1. The mission of libraries should be to provide access to books to anyone in their community without charge.
2. To fulfill that mission, libraries should be trying to acquire all the rights needed to give unfettered access to ebooks to anyone anyone in their community without charge.
3. Community access to ebooks is in many ways incompatible with business models in which restricted access to ebooks is sold to consumers. It doesn't make a lot of sense to pretend that ebooks have the same usage characteristics as print books.
4. Rational publishers should be willing to sell off ebook rights outright if the price that exceeds the present value of the ebooks expected revenue stream.
5. The amount of money libraries currently spend on books of all types would be sufficient to acquire outright many works, particularly those sold primarily to libraries.
6. The way for libraries to meet the publishers' price for these ebook assets is to organize into a collective that aggregates the total demand and acquires ebook rights.
7. Therefore, an ebook asset acquisition collective out to exist. Why is this not happening?

To some extent, it IS happening.

Frances Pinter, the publisher at Bloomsbury Academic, gave a keynote at the O'Reilly Tools of Change for Publishing conference this past February on her proposal for an "International Library Coalition
for Open Books".

Pinter sees a funding model through the eyes of a publisher, which I'm not, but the idea is pretty much the same. A mechanism that enables open-access to scholarly monographs while keeping the enterprise of publishing economically viable would be of great benefit to society at large.

After the previous post, I got feedback that publishers would be very hesitant to sell off ebook rights; publishers view their intellectual property rights as "part of the company" and divesting of this rights would be a "liquidation strategy". I was surprised at this view. I would have thought most publishers are more interested in the production and launch of books than in servicing them in perpetuity. From a business point of view, books are like the loans made by banks. You put out money up front, and make that money back as a stream of payments.

The banking industry has advanced far beyond the view that holding assets is their core business. Banks that originate the loans don't service them any more, they sell off the loans so they can make new loans. And, no that's not what led to the banking crisis. Publishers of all stripes should likewise be willing to cash in their book assets and use the proceeds to produce new ones.

Another type of feedback I got was that the logistics of buying and selling ebook rights could be difficult. For example, how would a publisher plan print runs and promotion? If a print run had just been paid for, the publisher would be loathe to sell off ebook rights. If a book was due to be published in February and announced in a Spring catalogue that goes to press in December, when might it be sold to a library collective, and how quickly would the collective be able to decide?

There are a couple of answers. First of all, smaller print runs and more POD minimize the risk of printing too many books. This is happening anyway. Second, I assume that publishers can build in print risk to the price they ask for. If printing is really only 25% of first copy cost, well that's only 25%. Supply chain markup is as much as 50%

I'm a pretty strong believer in markets. I imagine that a library collective would help to create a more efficient market for publishing assets which are  deployed awkwardly in the current system. Nothing would force publishers to accept any disadvantageous price for an asset.  The library collective would weigh the price and quality of each asset before deciding, presumably using automated systems,  which ones to acquire collectively. Building internet-based markets is a technology that is reasonably well understood; librarians are familiar with automated purchasing systems and with collaborative selection. It shouldn't be too hard to put an expiration date on an publisher's offer to sell- we've all heard of eBay.

I expect that there will be a variety of product life-cycles for ebooks. The typical midlist book today spends some time on bookshelves before being returned to the publisher or set out on the discount racks. Its life may be extended on Amazon; used-bookstores enter the channel without contributing any revenue back to the publisher. The typical library-acquired title might have had a "toll-access" run of a year or so; the publisher could capture the most eager purchasers using delivery systems using DRM. Most libraries would wait for the book to be acquired by the collective at a discount and made open-access. This market market segmentation is similar to the hardcover/paperback model which adds efficiency to the current market.

Some publishers might try to sell ebooks even before the book is published; they might even succeed. Some books won't get bought at any price, let alone at the cost to produce them; others would probably be acquired even at an obscene profit margin for the publisher. Some things never change.

The biggest uncertainty with a system that allows libraries to collectively acquire ebook rights (including the rights to give them away!) is size of the revenue lost to free-riders. The free riders would be of two types; libraries that don't participate in the system, and book buyers not associated with libraries. The share of sales made by university presses outside of libraries varies from press to press, but some presses indicate that as much as 70% of their sales occurs outside of libraries. This share has increased over the last decade or so, thanks to new sales channels such as Amazon and tightening library budgets. One possible solution to this issue would be to open the collective to consumers; I will write more about this in the future.

Then there's the issue of libraries that would choose not to participate in funding the acquisition collective but would still benefit from the ebooks liberated by the collective. If an ebook rights acquisition collective comes to pass, we'd really find out how much libraries like to work together!

Inter-Library Loan Reinvented for eBooks and Just-In-Time

My graduate school training was in engineering and in physics. In engineering, you put things together and try to get them to work. In physics, you smash things (the polite term is "perturbation") to help you understand how they had been working. I still use these approaches to help me understand the things I write about. You can learn a lot about a system be noting the bits that squawk when faced with a perturbation of the system.

I got a lot of interesting feedback on my article on patron-driven ebook acquisition. It seems that this perturbation in library processes could have wide ranging effects far outside of libraries and book publishing. Coincidentally, the patron-driven model, along with other changes in the library/publisher ecosystem, was discussed last weekend at a meeting of the American Association of University Publishers (AAUP). Publishers Weekly has a nice report. (See also a report in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

The biggest perturbation being imposed on this system is of course the reduction of library budgets, which has come down quite painfully on university presses and their monograph businesses. Still, speaker Joe Esposito was surprised that the strongest reaction to his talk was to his prediction that libraries would make up a shrinking fraction of the university presses' sales.

It seems that there is worry that a contraction or restructuring of monograph publishing could have repercussions for how scholars obtain tenure in the humanities:

The fact that monograph publishing exists to support tenure and the structure of academic employment is an inconvenient truth that can no longer be glossed by either the Academy its associated University Presses. At some point the Academy is either going to have to stop expecting University Presses to fulfill this need, or find a more honest and transparent way of funding it.

if that's the worst thing that happens, well, what's the big deal?

It won't be a shift to patron-driven acquisition that kills off monograph publishing, however. My reasoning is that from the point of view of economics, patron driven acquisition is roughly isomorphic with the current system of just-in-case purchasing coupled with inter-library loan (ILL).

Here's how things work for print monographs. Suppose a university press published an obscure but brilliant scholarly monograph five years ago. It might have sold 100 copies for $100 apiece, most of them to libraries. At $10,000 gross revenue, it was hard for the press to make much profit, but occasionally they get lucky and make enough to cover the losses on the rest of their catalog. Now here's the problem: Over the five years, there were only about 100 scholars in the entire world that really wanted to read the monograph. Unfortunately, only 50 of them worked at institutions that purchased the book. The libraries of the other 50 didn't purchase the book because the selectors in their libraries weren't omniscient or perfect, and they didn't have mind-reading abilities or the power of divination. Or maybe the libraries used an approval plan that hadn't been crafted with the obscure field of this monograph in mind.

But those 50 others still got to read the monograph, because of inter-library loan. For some libraries, ILL is even a revenue center, because their costs to lend are less than the fees they charge. Although publishers made money from the 50 libraries that bought the book and didn't use it, they don't capture any of the revenue from ILL activity. The libraries that spent money to buy the book right away are partially compensated for that expenditure by ILL revenue or reciprocal loans.

Now let's think about what happens in a future where just-in-time ebook acquisition dominates. The 100 users still get to use the monograph, but none of them need to wait for an ILL transaction to go through. The costs are assigned to the institutions that actually use the work. If we assume that the price of the monograph is unchanged, the publisher's revenue is also unchanged; except it's pushed out to the time of usage, which can be many years, especially in the humanities. The time value of this revenue stream is reduced- it takes longer to make back the money spent on producing the book.

The compensation for the publisher is that the revenue continues for as long as the work is still used. The book doesn't go out of print. In addition, since users can discover the monograph more widely, and obtain it immediately, there is the possibility of making additional sales to users who would never have requested the title via ILL.

In a sense, the patron-driven acquisition model is souped-up ILL, with usage fees accruing to the publisher. The comments of Macmillan's John Sargent earlier this year that publishers would like to see fees for library ebook lending don't seem so controversial when examined under this lens.

It's worth thinking through a publisher's pricing strategy. If libraries persist in their preference to remove price as a factor in the patron's decision to use an ebook, then publishers have no incentive to cut costs and keep prices moderate. If libraries allow automatic purchase of any ebook under $100, then publishers will price all of their products at $99. A similar dynamic in the US health care industry has not worked well for consumers, to say the least. Indeed, one university press publisher writing about patron-driven acquisition and the AAUP meeting has opined that patron selection will lead to higher monograph prices:

What this Patron Driven Access model means to university presses is that our future is likely to include two things—higher prices and fewer titles.

It's clear that there would be winners and losers under a just-in-time acquisition system. Librarians don't always select what their patrons really want to read. Controversial works might do quite well, as should engaging but hard-to-categorize works and works that don't break new ground but are readable and useful. Dry, unreadable, redundant works that sell well today because of the author's fame or because they fit into a "hot" field of research will be losers. A work that today is unread because it's too innovative and ahead of its time will eventually find its time under the just-in-time acquisition.

The huge change for monograph publishers will be in the way they market their products. The emphasis will shift from pre-publication marketing to libraries towards search engine optimization and post-publication marketing directly to users. Famous professors may find themselves awash in free ebooks as monograph publishers jockey for key citations and mentions; social networks and subject specific communities will be prime targets of monograph promotion. Publishers will abandon library convention exhibits like ALA in droves; parties and receptions for librarians will disappear.

I suppose we should have fun with the current system while it lasts, even as there are new and more efficient things to build.

How Electronic Resources Really Get Priced

The recent letter (pdf) from the University of California Digital Library (CDL) about price increases  proposed by Nature Publishing Group (NPG) and the response from NPG have raised a storm of controversy and rebuttal (pdf). To me, the mess is symptomatic of a communications failure between publishers and librarians.

In the interests of promoting better library-publisher understanding, I've decided to reveal some secrets from both sides.

Libraries: Here's how publishers set pricing for electronic resources.

Once upon a time, pricing for library materials had a relation to the cost of their production. Even before the internet came along, this started to change. Printing costs fell, and more and more of the production costs of a good-quality journal were "first-copy" expenses. With electronic materials, the marginal cost of servicing an additional subscription became almost zero. Pricing then became a game whose object was to sustain existing pricing, along with "reasonable" annual increases of a few percent per year or so. (Nature Publishing translates "a few" to "7".)

The game was most difficult for very large or complex institutions. The value of a top medical journal to a US medical school is huge; the value of the same journal to a vo-tech school would be much smaller, but still significant. A medical school in a developing country will also need the journal, but it's not fair to ask them to pay the same as a US school. Differential pricing helps a publisher capture value while still extending access to customers who might otherwise be able to afford the journal. But how, then, to set pricing?

I learned the secret of e-resource pricing through long hours of research (spent mostly in bars). Here's how it works:

1. Find out how much money the customer has.
2. Set price somewhat higher than that.
3. After hard bargaining by customer, offer discount to closely match customer's available funds.
4. Swear customer to secrecy; you can't give that price to everybody!
   

In times of budgetary cutbacks, this pricing mechanism works to a library's advantage. A library that needs to cut its electronic resource expenditure in half simply needs to disclose to salespeople the fact that their funding has been cut in half, cancel the subscription...and wait for panic to set in.

The library's leverage will never be greater. It's much more painful for a digital publisher to lose an digital customer than it is to lose a print customer. That's because the publisher has to spend money on digital publishing infrastructure when its customer base grows, but doesn't get anything back when a the customers go away. If anything, the publisher will have to spend more on sales to try replace the customers.

Oh and by the way, libraries, this all works easier if things are quiet- when you agree to give a publisher a higher price than you wanted to, swear them to secrecy- you can't afford to give the same deal to every one of your publishers!

Publishers: Here's how to get libraries to cave on pricing

Many librarians suffer from feelings of powerlessness. They are prisoners of their patrons' needs and desires. They are captive to changing technologies and archaic standards. They are trapped in arbitrary budget gaps. And they are stuck in endless committee meetings.

Libraries are thus willing to spend a great deal on things which offer escape from powerlessness. They dislike monolithic packages that bundle content together, even if they save money. The current reality in libraries is that budgets have been cut. Publishers need to give their library customers options that help them deal with budget cuts. The smartest publishers can figure out ways to help libraries cut costs and free up funds currently spent in other areas.

When I was developing an electronic resource management service for libraries, I had this recurring nightmare that e-journal publishers would someday make it as easy for libraries to activate and maintain an e-journal subscription as Apple's iTunes makes it to buy and maintain a song. My software would instantly become worthless. Just kidding- I slept soundly knowing it would never happen in a million years.

Perhaps NPG confused powerlessness with weakness and saw an opportunity to force CDL to act like the other prisoners. Perhaps NPG never saw the movie "Cool Hand Luke".