Systemwide Library and Scholarly Information Advisory Committee

April 23, 2008, 10 a.m. – 3 p.m.
UC Office of the President, 1111 Franklin Street, Room 5320

Meeting Notes


Members Attending: Wartella (Chair); Bisom; Butter; Crow; Farley; Goldberg; Hafner; LeCuyer; Streitz; Strong; Waldron; Withey
Staff and Consultants: Candee; Lawrence
Guests: Ivy Anderson; Patricia Cruse (CDL)
Members Absent: Bourne; Brown; Gillman; Greenstein; Ingham; Jenny; Louis; MacDonald; Walter

1.  Introductions

Wartella and Butter noted that this would be their last SLASIAC meeting, as their terms end July 1; Gene Lucas, Executive Vice Chancellor at UCSB, has agreed to serve as SLASIAC Chair for a three-year term.  This was also the last SLASIAC meeting for Lawrence, who will be retiring.

2.  Scholarly Communication

2.a.  University publishing and broadcasting initiatives (Update)

Background:  (Reference): Meeting notes, SLASIAC meeting of 10/22/07 (<http://www.slp.ucop.edu/consultation/slasiac/notes_102207.html>), Item 5

Withey reported that there has been substantial interest in and favorable comment on the report of the SLASIAC Task Force on UC-based Scholarly Publishing (see the meeting notes for October 22, 2007, item 5, at <http://www.slp.ucop.edu/consultation/slasiac/notes_102207.html>, and the report at <http://www.slp.ucop.edu/consultation/slasiac/102207/SLASIAC_Pub_Task_Force_Report_final.doc>), including discussion with Kevin Guthrie and Laura Brown of ITHAKA, the sponsor and author respectively of the report “University Publishing In A Digital Age” <http://www.ithaka.org/strategic-services/university-publishing>.

Candee updated the committee on her current work in her new assignment as Executive Director for Strategic Publishing and Broadcast Initiatives, which is aimed at reviewing systemwide publishing and broadcasting programs to identify opportunities to achieve leverage across the programs and avoid unnecessary duplication of effort and investment.  Among the initiatives under discussion are:

2.b. Standing Subcommittee on Copyright Policy (Update)

Goldberg reported that the recent work of the subcommittee has focused on the following areas:
An overarching theme in the subcommittee’s consideration of all these issues is a dramatic need for improved copyright information and education, for the UC community generally and the faculty in particular.  For example, it seems to the group desirable to prepare useful guidance on compliance in using others’ copyrighted works in teaching and research in preference to promulgating arbitrary and quickly-outdated guidelines as part of a formal policy process.  The same rationale can be applied to file-sharing issues, the complexities of open-source software (as these apply both to developers and users), and options for management of the rights in faculty-authored works.

With regard to the subcommittee’s discussion papers, these are currently intended to help focus the group’s discussions and surface actionable ideas (chiefly but not exclusively for copyright education opportunities), and are not now envisioned as candidates for broader dissemination and comment.  In the case of the open source software topic, the group recognizes the interaction between copyright, patent, and licensing domains that characterize this area and add greatly to the complexity, and acknowledges the prior work, highlighted by Hafner, conducted jointly by OTT, IR&C, OGC, and University contracting experts to bring greater clarity to this area (N.B. both OTT and OGC are represented on the subcommittee).  

Given the group’s emphasis on the importance of copyright education, they are strongly supportive of the proposed SLASIAC town hall meetings (see agenda item 2.d. below) and believe that those venues provide an important opportunity both to expose the faculty to these complex issues and gain valuable information from the community on how to approach them.

Strong commended SLASIAC and the subcommittee for beginning to frame these issues, remarked that their complexity tended to confound discussion and action, and noted that a common vocabulary is key to promoting meaningful dialog among diverse stakeholders with multiple perspectives.  Strong also urged SLASIAC and the subcommittee to be mindful about students’ rights and perspectives, a matter that is touched on only lightly in current UC policy.

2.c.  Scholars’ copyright management (Information/Discussion)

2.c.i. The NIH deposit requirement

Background:
Lawrence summarized the requirements imposed on UC and its NIH-funded PIs to deposit a copy of the final peer-reviewed manuscript of all journal articles resulting from NIH-supported research in the NIH PubMed Central (PMC) repository, beginning April 7, 2008, and to include the PMC document number when they cite their published research in all proposals, progress reports and final reports submitted to NIH beginning May 25, 2008.  He identified some of the complexities involved in this process, including the variety of positions and relationships that various publishers have established with regard to deposit of articles in PMC and the need for authors to ensure, and sometimes negotiate with publishers to provide, that their publication agreements provide them with the rights necessary to meet PMC deposit requirements.  He went on to describe steps already taken, including the promulgation of guidance to campus research administration offices, the initiatives by all campus libraries to work with their RAOs to provide information and assistance to faculty, the efforts of the Regents’ Office of Ethics, Compliance and Audit to communicate broadly with campus constituencies on NIH compliance requirements and available support services, and the CDL’s efforts to incorporate the necessary grants of rights in UC’s license agreements with publishers as these come up for renewal.  In discussion, a SLASIAC member reported that discussion of a similar requirement has emerged at NSF (where the matter is complicated by the fact that NSF does not have its own agency-operated repository, similar to PMC, where the agency-supported manuscripts could be deposited).

Action:  It was the sense of SLASIAC that the University, as a systemwide entity, should take advantage of the opportunity to support the NIH policy during the agency’s recently-announced solicitation of public comments (ending May 31); Lawrence committed to activating the currently-involved UCOP offices to consult with their constituencies and develop a unified response.

2.c.ii.  The Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences open access initiative and prospects for a UC open access policy

Background:
Crow began by observing that open access (OA) requirements by funding agencies, like the NIH policy, are helpful but not sufficient, as much research by UC faculty is not extramurally sponsored, an issue particularly for the humanities and many of the social sciences.  He also observed that while OA is an important step, it is not a panacea: OA threatens existing publishing business models, and many of the resulting concerns about the financial sustainability of scholarly publishing expressed both by publishers and faculty members are valid.  In this context Crow, Candee and Lawrence variously expressed the view that the appropriate goal was to enhance discovery of and access to the results of research and scholarship; OA is one of several means to that end, and that the multiple strategies are not mutually exclusive.

In Crow’s assessment, the commentary on the proposed UC open access policy of 2007 revealed three fundamental concerns:
The Harvard policy, in Crow’s view, both addresses some of these issues (as written, it is substantially less complicated and burdensome, although silent on most of the implementation details that might ultimately raise these concerns) and provides an opportunity to overcome some of the natural faculty uncertainty by reference to Harvard’s initiative.  To begin exploring the possibilities, a small group consisting of selected members of Crow’s University Committee on Libraries and Scholarly Information (UCOLASC) in collaboration with Candee and Lawrence has begun consultations to (a) identify faculty supporters on each campus and encourage them to place opinion pieces in campus publications and Web sites (see, for example, Crow’s article on the UCSC news site at <http://www.ucsc.edu/news_events/text.asp?pid=1970>), and (b) review a draft markup of the Harvard resolution, prepared by Lawrence and Candee, that might serve as a point of departure for a “lightweight” UC policy.

In its meeting on April 18, UCOLASC considered the results of the 2007 OA policy review and recognized that broader discussion with and engagement by faculty would be necessary as a precondition to successful approval of a UC OA policy, and recommends strongly that the issue be placed at the center of the proposed SLASIAC town hall meetings (see item 2.d. below).  In addition, the committee discussed other options for moving forward.  First, the committee has agreed to draft a resolution articulating a basic set of principles regarding open access, initially for discussion within Senate divisions and then for Academic Council discussion and endorsement, on the theory that adoption of an OA policy would be facilitated by faculty endorsement of a set of common principles that the policy could then be seen to support.  Second, recognizing that the Harvard faculty of arts and sciences is a smaller, more homogeneous and geographically much less dispersed group than the UC faculty, the committee considered whether it might advocate for the Senate divisions to take independent actions based on the Harvard example, much as the Santa Cruz division did in its 2003 Resolution on Ties with Elsevier Journals (<http://senate.ucsc.edu/col/res.1405.pdf>).

In discussion, it was observed that:

2.d   Planning for SLASIAC-sponsored campus town hall meetings on faculty as authors, editors and publishers, fall 2008 (Discussion/ACTION)

Background:  (Reference): Meeting notes, SLASIAC meeting of 10/22/07 (<http://www.slp.ucop.edu/consultation/slasiac/notes_102207.html>), Items 2, 5, and 8

To advance the planning for campus town hall meetings in fall 2008, SLASIAC agreed that:
Action:

3.   CDL update

3.a   Digital preservation – progress and challenges (Update)

Patricia Cruse, Director of Preservation for the CDL, reported that the CDL and the UC Libraries have given long and careful consideration to means of ensuring the long-term usability of digital information resources, which requires that these resources remain accessible, usable (especially in the face of changing technologies) and authentic.  The Libraries, through the CDL, have employed two strategies to achieve this:  (a) the use of third-party services, like Portico (<http://www.portico.org/>) when outsourcing is both cost effective and provides exemplary service, and (b) establishment of a UC Digital Preservation Repository (DPR).  The DPR is currently in limited use by the UC Libraries and is rapidly expanding its service portfolio.  Current planning, development and use partners include the Libraries (with a special emphasis on digital or digitized special collections), the UC Press, UC eScholarship and other UC units within the “University as publisher” umbrella, and other academic, special and public libraries and archives in California who participate in, for example, the CDL’s Online Archive of California and Calisphere services.  

In the immediate future, the DPR will begin to work on the preservation challenges of the Libraries’ mass digitization efforts (e.g., Google Books), new campus-created content (e.g., electronic theses and dissertations, archived UCTV broadcasts, museum content), and Web content. In the latter case, the CPR is now rolling out its Web Archiving Service (WAS), which will enable the Libraries and eventually other campus units to automatically harvest and preserve valuable but fugitive Web content, including for example curated collections of Web resources, campus-hosted Web sites, and the new “gray literature” of academic weblogs and wikis. In developing these services, the DPR is working closely with data providers at all campuses in order to effectively distribute the workload, ensure sustainability, and guarantee responsiveness to “customer” needs.  It is expected that, by the end of the calendar year, the DPR will be managing 32 terabytes of information on behalf of the UC community.

Because preservation of digital content is new territory (not just for UC, but worldwide), little is known about the real costs of providing digital preservation services, so the DPR, in consultation with the University Librarians, is launching a set of pilot projects to help document and understand the cost and budgeting implications.  In addition, digital preservation challenges are not only of interest to libraries, but throughout the developing academic cyberinfrastructure.  To help understand, and contribute to the understanding of, these broader issues, the CDL has participated in the development of a number of proposals prepared in response to the NSF’s DataNet initiative (<http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2007/nsf07601/nsf07601.pdf>). 

3.b.  UC/OCLC pilot library catalog project (Information)

Farley reported that the project, now identified as the Next Generation MELVYL Pilot Project, had its inceptions in the work of the UC Libraries Bibliographic Services Task Force (BSTF; <http://libraries.universityofcalifornia.edu/sopag/BSTF/Final.pdf>), which recommended a variety of strategies to bring the University’s bibliography systems and services up to the current state of the art, better meet user expectations, and provide advanced services that take maximum advantage of the burgeoning array of information sources and services available at the level of the worldwide network.  In considering how to act on these recommendations, the Libraries considered the options of building their own system(s) or purchasing updated systems and services from the traditional library system vendors, but found these options overly challenging, enormously expensive, and incomplete.  Ultimately, the Libraries decided to launch an experimental service with OCLC (<http://www.oclc.org/us/en/global/default.htm>), an international non-profit membership organization based in the U.S., whose WorldCat, WorldCat local, and other services promised to provide much of what was called for in the BSTF report.  OCLC, with which the UC Libraries have had business and service relationships for many years, has proven to be a willing partner, working with the Libraries to adapt their services to UC’s needs.  The pilot project, which is scheduled to “go live” in May, and will extend at least through December 2008, will incorporate most of the data currently included in the MELVYL catalog, but with an advanced interface, a variety of new search, display and linking options, and inclusion of search results from the global WorldCat library database.  A formal evaluation process will systematically assess both the operation of the pilot system and users’ experience, and provide the foundation for a future decision on whether to continue the partnership with OCLC and adopt the new system as UC’s default online union catalog.

3.c. Journal publisher negotiations (Update)

Ivy Anderson, CDL Director of Collections, provided an overview of the characteristics and costs of the UL Libraries’ licensed shared digital journal collections and the CDL’s approaches to negotiations with publishers.  In 2007-08, the total expenditure for 23,902 shared online journal titles by the UC Libraries was over $22 million, equivalent to about $2,600 per tenure-track faculty FTE.    Anderson emphasized that these figures are for shared electronic journals only, excluding campus subscriptions, print journals, and other materials.  Gathering comprehensive data for both campus and systemwide journals, not a trivial task, would yield significantly higher numbers.  

In 2008, the UC Libraries will spend $22,250,000 on shared electronic journals – roughly 35% of the combined UC library materials expenditures from state funds.  These expenditures have risen steadily as a percentage of total library materials, from 25% in 2004 to 35% in 2008.  Not all of this is due to price increases; the libraries have also increased their shared journal holdings during that time by adding several major journal packages.  Nonetheless, the upward trend is symptomatic of the disconnect between the rising cost of journals and the static nature of UC library budgets: whereas the UC Libraries materials budget has grown an average of 1.6% per year over the past 3 years, the cost of our shared multi-year ejournal licenses during that same period has risen an average of 3.5% per year.  Journals that are not under a multi-year contract can experience significantly higher annual cost increases.  In the case of Nature, we have experienced increases as high as 63% in a single year.  Journal list price increases in the industry as a whole are generally running about 8.2% per year.   

Cost avoidance resulting from negotiated multi-year journal licenses is in the millions of dollars per year.  Further, in 2008, CDL adopted a value-based negotiating strategy based on the Value-Based pricing study conducted by the UC Libraries systemwide collection development committee in 2007 (their report, “The Promise of Value-based Journal Prices and Negotiation: A UC Report and View Forward,” is available at <http://libraries.universityofcalifornia.edu/cdc/valuebasedprices.pdf>).  This group sought to identify a set of objective metrics by which to compare the value of commercial and non-profit journals and create a set of benchmarks by which to assess pricing and set price increases.  Using the relative cost indices developed by Ted Bergstrom at UCSB and Preston MacAfee at CalTech, the group developed an algorithm for establishing a target price point and applied this in negotiations with 5 major publishers – ACS, Blackwell, Karger, Sage, and Springer.  One principle in this algorithm involved identifying the number of UC faculty-authored articles in each publisher’s journals and seeking to have that credited in the license in recognition of the value contributed to the journals by UC authors.  A second principled objective of these negotiations was to reduce annual increases using a 3-year average of the Bureau of Labor Statistics Producer Price Index, whose most recent average is 1.8%.

This approach produced some positive results in our 2008 journal negotiations, usually in the form of additional content or other price concessions.  One publisher, ACS, agreed to credit UC authorship in its pricing model.  Most successful perhaps in these negotiations was our insistence on low annual increase caps, which we have brought down in the aggregate to about 2.2% per year.  In some cases these levels are achieved in conjunction with additional major one-time purchases from CDL funds, deep backfile for example, which we purchased this year from both Sage and Blackwell publishers.

Another area that we have pursued with some vigor in the past year has been publisher receptivity to open access, in the form of so-called ‘author pays’ business models and willingness to allow deposit in an OA repository.  Most of these publishers now offer some form of ‘author pays’ business model under a variety of names – open choice, sponsored access, online open, etc. – and we have been successful in getting several of the publishers to agree to provide reports of their open access articles, and to at least enter into discussions about how this will be factored into their pricing.  In one case, Springer, we are attempting to secure a provision comparable to one recently negotiated by the Max Planck Institute which allows all articles by Max Planck-affiliated authors to be published as open access without any author fees, in consideration for the library’s subscription license.  We have also been considering a license provision that would secure for UC-affiliated authors the right, should they so choose, to retain their copyrights and to deposit articles in an institutional or subject-based repository.  

As many libraries migrate away from print subscriptions and publishers begin to release electronic-only titles, figuring out how to price journals for an academic market has become an even more complex business than it ever was.  It used to be the case that large, research-intensive institutions sorted themselves out from smaller ones by the number of multiple print subscriptions that were scattered across a wide variety of decentralized libraries, departments, labs, and research centers.  In the current environment however, multiple print subscriptions are declining, and a new, tiered pricing model is taking hold which ranks institutions by a variety of measures such as FTE, Carnegie Classification, or usage.  This particularly disadvantages large research-intensive institutions such as UC because the institution can no longer control its level of investment in an individual title.  Once a publisher has placed your institution in a particular tier, each of its journals will be priced accordingly, regardless of whether a particular title is in high demand or serves a niche population that might warrant a more limited investment.  Thus, our costs are uniformly raised across the board.  The tier pricing phenomenon has not yet caught on with the very large commercial STM publishers in a significant way, but many societies have adopted it, and at least one of the large commercial publishers, Wiley-Blackwell, is experimenting with it for newly launched titles.  Migration to a tiered pricing model has proved a particular challenge in negotiating with ACS this year.

The CDL’s 2008 negotiations were undertaken as something of a trial run for Elsevier, which is fast coming up in 2009.  UC’s Elsevier license is by far the most costly of any journals license at UC, totaling over $8 million every year.  For comparison, the closest competitor will soon be the recently merged Wiley-Blackwell publishing organization, which has a combined cost to UC of roughly $5 million; next after that is Springer at $3 million.  The number of titles that we subscribe to from each of these publishers is now roughly the same.  So there is still a very wide gap between Elsevier and everyone else (although on a cost-per-title basis, ACS is the highest by far among the group).  In initial discussions, Elsevier seems more resigned to the state of academic library budgets than they were in 2003.  With a saturated academic journals market, Elsevier is turning to other sources of revenue growth; one new direction of relevance to UC is the exploration of new tools to support research collaboration (for faculty) and research productivity and assessment (for academic administrators).  The libraries are just gearing up to review the Elsevier journals portfolio and attempt to identify titles that are truly core ‘must-haves’ in order to position ourselves for a productive negotiation.  Whether a broad faculty outreach will be warranted in this round is a question we hope to figure out as our discussions and analysis progress. 

4.    Scholarly information and UC Cyberinfrastructure – joint SLASIAC/Information Technology Leadership Council Task Force

Background:
LeCuyer provided a brief synopsis of the IT Guidance Committee’s recommendations regarding UC cyberinfrastructure development, described the current work of the IT Leadership Council (currently largely focused on data center planning), and reported that the ITLC plans to devote the program portion of its May meeting to a discussion of academic information and scholarly communication issues.  Hafner noted that ITLC is best qualified to address issues related to infrastructure components – networks, servers, storage, etc. – and welcomes advice about the data that the system must be designed to support, including especially guidance about system architectures and standards.  Lawrence noted that, while the draft charge before the committee is necessarily rather general, his understanding has been enriched by recent discussions that highlight specific services that are needed to support a variety of academic and scholarly communication tasks, and recommended that a small group could help frame the charge and make it more concrete by assembling and incorporating a set of these specific tasks.

Action:  LeCuyer, Hafner, Strong, Candee, and Patricia Cruse (CD) agreed to assist in the effort to refine the charge; Lawrence will convene this effort.  Strong also suggested that Chris Borgman (UCLA) might be interested and would certainly be well qualified to assist.

5.  SLASIAC’s role in oversight of systemwide scholarly information services and initiatives

Background:
In discussion, committee members made clear their view that SLASIAC, as currently constituted, had neither the expertise nor the depth of engagement with systemwide library services to provide the kind of detailed oversight described in the background material, and recommended that UCOP pursue the establishment of one or more oversight boards representing constituencies who are closer to the specific services being provided. However, SLASIAC believes that provision of strategic advice regarding these services, especially in relation to each other and to broader strategic goals and opportunities, is an essential function that is entirely consistent with the committee’s current charge, and suggested that annual reports and other high-level planning and review documents coming from or through these services or their oversight boards should be provided to SLASIAC to facilitate this.