For Advice on Publishing in the Digital World, Scholars Turn to Campus Libraries
By JENNIFER HOWARD
"Rapidly changing" is the term most often used these days to describe the landscape of scholarly communication. Scholars have to clear new and higher hurdles as they bump up against copyright and fair-use issues, open-access mandates, and a baffling array of publication and dissemination models.
How much of his own published work can a scholar post on a personal Web site without raising his publisher's ire? How much of someone else's work can he use in his course pack without trampling on fair use and risking a fine or legal action? How does a researcher upload her work to her institution's repository, and are there consequences if she opts out? Those are just some of the questions that professors may find themselves tripping over.
Where can researchers find a guide to lead them through this 21st-century obstacle course?
The library, of course.
More institutions are creating or beefing up offices and programs in scholarly communication or hiring librarians with expertise in copyright and intellectual property.
Services vary wildly from place to place. But Karla Hahn, who directs the Office of Scholarly Communication for the Association of Research Libraries, has seen some major themes emerge. Faculty outreach — making sure that faculty members understand their rights and responsibilities and the options available to them — "is pretty universally a component," she says. Other common elements include helping academics figure out copyright issues and how to navigate institutional repositories. Offering publishing services outside of university presses is another large and growing area.
Over the past three years, Ms. Hahn says, many new programs have sprung up. Before that, research libraries held workshops or symposia on scholarly communication, but "we were not finding a lot of real established programs," she says. "The majority of our members now have some kind of programmatic emphasis."
She points to the interest generated by the association's Institute on Scholarly Communication, run jointly with the Association of College and Research Libraries. The institute holds periodic gatherings of library personnel assigned to scholarly-communication roles. For its first meeting, in 2005, "we had way more applications than we could accommodate in our 100 seats," Ms. Hahn told The Chronicle, and demand continues to be high.
The Chronicle talked with several people on the front lines about their enhanced roles. All of them are affiliated, loosely or closely, with research libraries, and their jobs reflect the wide array of services that now fall under the umbrella of scholarly communication programming.
The Copyright Czar
Kevin L. Smith, scholarly-communications officer at Duke University, has a staff of one: himself. Duke hired him two and a half years ago. He works out of the Duke University Libraries and maintains a blog, Scholarly Communications @ Duke, where he tracks and comments on major issues and developments. The blog is also designed to educate the university community about its rights and responsibilities.
"I'm supposed to be a resource for the whole university," he says. "I've been very, very busy from almost my first day." With a law degree as well as library expertise — a handy combination that is becoming more common among research librarians — Mr. Smith is particularly well equipped to handle questions about intellectual property and copyright as well as to help authors navigate the legal arcana of publishing contracts. He will even sometimes negotiate with a publisher on an author's behalf.
"Probably 65 to 70 percent of my time is dealing with the intellectual-property questions," he says. "Another 10 percent is spent trying to keep myself aware of national issues — legislation, litigation, things like the Google book settlement — and trying to figure out how they impact the university. Probably the remaining quarter of my time is spent dealing with publishing issues, author contracts, that kind of thing."
What he hears most often is a variation on the question "Can I use this particular piece of copyrighted material for whatever purpose I have in mind?" Maybe a graduate student wants to turn a journal article into a dissertation chapter. Perhaps a professor wants to post a chapter from her book on her Web site or pull a chapter of somebody else's for a course she's teaching.
Such concerns "take extraordinarily various forms, of course," Mr. Smith says. "Most often it's that they want to use somebody else's material."
He enjoys a good relationship with the university counsel's office, he says, but its work rarely overlaps with his. University lawyers "make the best decisions about how to reduce risk," he says. They're not there to answer copyright questions. For researchers, "I'm the person on whose door they can knock."
A High-Profile Mandate
Faculty outreach is also front and center in one of the most recent and most publicized experiments in scholarly communication. Harvard University's Faculty of Arts and Sciences voted in February to adopt an open-access requirement, requiring faculty members to deposit copies of journal articles in a new university repository.
To help scholars navigate the new requirement, the university established a dedicated Office for Scholarly Communication. It lives in the domain of Robert Darnton, director of the Harvard University Library, and is run by Stuart M. Shieber, a professor of computer science and a prime mover behind the open-access decision.
The new repository, called Digital Access to Scholarship at Harvard, or DASH, is now in beta testing. Mr. Shieber told The Chronicle in an e-mail interview that the university hopes it will be fully online early in the spring.
Mr. Shieber describes faculty interaction as "extremely important" to his office's mission. His staff has concentrated on getting the word out about the open-access policy, how to comply with it, and the mechanics of how to move work into DASH. The office is meeting with individual departments, and has staff members and student assistants who will help transfer articles and metadata into the repository.
Mr. Shieber told The Chronicle that just about all of Harvard's dozen or so faculties are considering open-access policies. "Each school has its own characteristics, and the policies need to be responsive to the differences among the schools," he says. "The process has to be faculty-based and consensual. But the office can help by advising and serving as a source for information."
Ambitions don't stop there. Mr. Shieber expects the office to evolve as "a laboratory for expanding and evolving scholarly communication practices." Perhaps its most important objective focuses on something of concern to librarians and scholars alike: figuring out a system to support authors who want to publish in open-access journals "by underwriting reasonable publication charges for those journals."
Paying to Publish
High publication costs are also much on the mind of David Stern, associate university librarian for scholarly resources at Brown University. Collection development is his primary charge. But that job now includes a portfolio of scholarly communication responsibilities, which he handles along with a team of other librarians. "It was recognized that the university needed to focus on accountability, return on investment, and compliance with new regulations," he told The Chronicle.
For Mr. Stern and his colleagues, that means raising "campus awareness" among faculty members and students. "That covers far more than just copyright," he says. "We talk about fair use and crediting and critical thinking and mashing, posting to the Web."
He and his colleagues contact every Brown researcher with a grant from the National Institutes of Health to make sure they know how to comply with the agency's public-access policy. It requires that research papers based on NIH-supported work be made freely available through the institutes' PubMed Central repository no later than 12 months after publication. That policy went into effect in April.
His job calls on him to sit down with authors to sort out their publishing choices, particularly with an eye to how much the different options cost. "At this point, what we're saying is 'Let's talk about the various business models, your roles in the process, and how your behaviors will influence the long-term solutions,'" Mr. Stern says.
Before he has that conversation with authors, Mr. Stern does the math. "We recommend that they select the highest-quality journal with the largest distribution, which is what they want," he says. But some journals charge higher authors' fees or have pricier subscription models than the university feels it can pay for. For instance, Mr. Stern ran the numbers and concluded that the library should not subsidize the Public Library of Science, an open-access science-publishing project that sustains its journals by charging authors (or their employers) $1,300 per article; it offers institutional memberships that reduce those fees. "We strongly support the idea of open access," Mr. Stern says. "We just have a problem with that particular business model."
"When we explain the financials" to authors, he says, "they understand it's not a matter of the money, it's a matter of the long-term viability. Many libraries don't do the analysis and just pay the bill. I'm here to do the analysis."
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Section: The Faculty
Volume 55, Issue 13, Page A8
