Feb. 4, 2003
EDITORIAL
Control Conundrum
University Libraries, Greed, and Lethargy
By Jack
Siggins
If you want to get an academic librarians viscera really churning,
ask him or her about publishers and journal vendors. In response, you
may get a churlish guffaw, a suspicious glare, or a mumbled vulgarity,
depending upon the individual, but the underlying feeling is the same
among almost all librarians: anger and alarm.
There is anger at the unapologetic profiteering of these companies.
There is alarm at the potential threat their business practices pose
for one of the most important cornerstones of our democracy: access
to information.
The gap in professional philosophies between librarians and commercial
vendors of information has been around a long time. For librarians,
the ideal service would be to provide any information at any time to
anyone for free, obviously a Utopian notion that librarians grudgingly
realize cannot exist. Vendors, who control the information the librarians
(and their users) want, seek to maximize profits from selling the information
they control. For centuries in this country, the tension arising from
these conflicting philosophies was managed by the two parties in a civilized
and respectful relationship. Librarians got their books and journal
subscriptions at a fair market price. Vendors and publishers made a
reasonable profit. There was always a little grousing by both parties
about rising costs, but for the most part, the law of supply and demand
seemed to work to the benefit of both.
So what went wrong? What happened to make librarians turn against their
former partners, the vendors and publishers? The steps and events leading
to this condition are clear, but the root cause can be summarized in
two words: greed and lethargy.
Greed
The transformation from seeking reasonable profits to price gouging
began innocently enough. Authors have a right to benefit from their
intellectual creations; vendors need to protect their investments in
literary property rights. Changes in technology, such as the development
of cheap and easy photocopying, threatened these rights. Beginning in
1976, copyright laws were changed to address those concerns. But what
began largely as a response to advancements in technology that made
information more widely and easily available, today has evolved into
a condition in which the cooperative relationship between two evenly
balanced partners in the information field has been superceded by the
almost total dominance of one the vendors over the other
the librarians.
Companies with large lobbying resources, such as Disney, have been successful
in convincing government agencies, courts, and legislatures to extend
their control over some intellectual property, rather than release them
to the public domain. Copyright laws have been changed. Laws have been
passed in state legislatures as well as in Congress. The Uniform Computer
Information Transactions Act (UCITA) was developed by publishers and
vendors to use as a model for state legislatures to pass. UCITA would
give vendors the authority to force libraries to narrowly restrict access
to their materials, bar photocopying, and eliminate interlibrary loans.
These same vendors for years also have aggressively threatened to take
to court any institution that the vendors say have violated their particular
interpretation of the vague and broadly written fair use clause of the
copyright laws.
Today, the vast majority of both hardcopy and electronic journals required
by academic institutions for their libraries are owned or controlled
by a small group of mostly international vendor companies, such as Reed
Elsevier. As they have extended their control, they have escalated annual
price increases by as much as 35-50 percent, in some cases, while imposing
severe restrictions on access, copying, and interlibrary loan. Even
academic organizations, such as the American Chemical Society, have
assumed these practices in order, they admit, to make money.
Lethargy
Ironies abound from this situation. Faculty depend upon libraries mostly
to provide access to the journals they need for research and instructions.
Libraries have to decide whether to pay outrageously high subscription
costs from budget allocations from university administrations that are
having trouble with rising costs themselves. Faculty criticize university
administrators about non-support of library collection budgets made
worse by the high subscription costs and complain to librarians about
restrictions on copying and such services as reserves. And yet faculty
are the sources of the very articles that are printed in the publications
controlled by the vendors charging the high prices.
The vendors and publishers have figured this out. They know that faculty
and research authors are disinclined to intervene with their own societies
to stop handing over control of their own journals to commercial vendors.
They know universities are loath to take on lawsuits from vendors. They
know that legislators are easy to convince through misinformation, lobbying,
and re-election contributions.
Library organizations such as the Association of Research Libraries,
working with a few organizations such as the AAU, have fought back by
increasing their own lobbying campaign and by encouraging the development
of alternative academic publications that charge more reasonable prices.
Academic consortia, such as the Washington Research Library Consortium,
have joined forces and combined resources to counter the power of the
big vendors.
But a significant effort still needs to be made by faculty and researchers.
At some point, they need to take back the copyrights on their own articles
and urge their professional societies not to sell publishing rights
to the oligopoly of vendors. Until all of us are actively engaged in
this effort, one of the most basic cornerstones of our democracy
open access to information will continue to be seriously eroded.
Jack Siggins is the University librarian.
Send feedback to: bygeorge@gwu.edu