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The mathematician Gowers recently wrote in his much-noticed blog post "Elsevier - my part in its downfall" about the absurd situation in academic publishing:

A possible explanation is that to do something about the situation requires coordinated action. Even if one library refuses to subscribe to Elsevier journals, plenty of others will feel that they can’t refuse, and Elsevier won’t mind too much. But if all libraries were prepared to club together and negotiate jointly, doing a kind of reverse bundling — accept this deal or none of us will subscribe to any of your journals — then Elsevier’s profits (which are huge, by the way) would be genuinely threatened. However, it seems unlikely that any such massive coordination between libraries will ever take place.

Can anyone explain why such massive coordination between libraries is so unlikely? Given the fact that the problem with serials prices is well known since many years and it affects almost all academic libraries (including Harvard) it's really surprising that the library community seems unable to take jointly a stand against the big publishers.

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5 Answers

up vote 4 down vote

Why would you think there would be a collective response?

  • Far from all librarians, much less all library administrators, are convinced that open access has legs. (I've worked for and with many that didn't.) A good many, in smaller schools especially, have yet to figure out that open access is a thing, even.
  • Many librarians (again including administrators) believe that the purpose of collections money is to, you know, buy stuff! For the local patronbase! Insofar as open access doesn't work that way, it runs counter to how they think the world works, how they think it should work.
  • Institutional repositories have on balance (and with exceptions) been abject failures. Given that, many librarians are understandably skeptical of OA rhetoric, some of which is rather overblown (and I say this as a staunch OA advocate) or abusive of libraries and librarians.
  • When faculty say "jump," librarians say "how high?" Faculty have not exactly said "let's jump to open access!" Twelve thousand Elsevier boycotters, while significant, is a needle in the haystack of US faculty, never mind worldwide. Librarians can be forgiven for thinking "not yet."
  • Have you been watching the convulsions over small-scale collaborative collection development at all? Large-scale collaboration is not a thing US academic libraries do. (The situation's a little different in the UK; JISC applies cattleprods when it sees fit.) This may change somewhat with the advent of Hathi Trust, but not quickly.
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3  
I should add to this that the major journal monopolists muddy the waters with non-disclosure agreements on their licenses. Libraries can't even legally find out what other libraries are paying for journals! There have been attacks on this secrecy, typically through FOIA requests to public universities which libraries gleefully fulfilled, but it's still a tremendous barrier to a sane, transparent journal market. – dsalo Jun 1 '12 at 13:20
I'm curious as to why you think most IRs are failures. Maybe I just haven't heard of the ones that failed (because they failed, right?) but it seems that there are several extremely successful ones providing access to millions of items collectively. – phette23 Jun 1 '12 at 21:06
Well, there's a definitional issue here -- what's success? -- but I've run two of the damn things, and if "open access to the peer-reviewed literature produced by the institution" is the success metric, forget about it. – dsalo Jun 1 '12 at 23:35
up vote 3 down vote

Consortium is typically the best way to combat these kinds of actions. Libraries do work together regionally in this way. In extreme price hikes, they do collaborate in bans such as the University of California system ban on Nature for their 400% price increase. http://classic.the-scientist.com/blog/display/57491/

Many of the vendors don't even work with consortia or work very well (Overdrive is a good example of that, http://librarianinblack.net/librarianinblack/2011/12/overdrive.html)

The Digital Public Library of America also has this as a focus: http://dp.la/wiki/Main_Page

Much of the time, a library's focus in on their community not someone else's. Even though a price hike effects everyone, the local politics may dictate for them to continue with it rather than rock the boat.

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Consortia may just mask the problems -- like the California/Nature incident a few years back ... Nature blamed the 400% increase in prices (when they had said they had a 7% cap) on the removal (scaling back?) of CDL's discount. – Joe Jun 1 '12 at 0:44
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Having run a consortial institutional repository and been involved with another, I can tell you that getting a consortium to pull together is worse than herding cats. For anything novel, like open access, forget about it; there's always a conservative somewhere on the committee to scuttle it. – dsalo Jun 1 '12 at 1:21
During the California/Nature incident, there was a remarkable comment from the CDL that, if they were able to hold their discount for such a long time, means that all other libriaries just paying too much over the same period. It seems to me that consortia just have inreased the intransparency, because every consortia deal is tailored especially for one consortia. – Christian Jun 2 '12 at 19:42
up vote 3 down vote

Believe it or not, there's also the specter of antitrust litigation. The Sherman Antitrust Act "prohibits collective action in restraint of trade. The most significant area of antitrust concern for associations is price-fixing. Price-fixing in the association context is broadly construed to include any concerted effort or action that has an effect on prices, terms or conditions of trade, or on competition." (from the American Association of Law Libraries, http://www.aallnet.org/Archived/Advocacy/Vendor-Relations/faq.html).

For more on this, you may wish to read:

Greene, Hillary, Antitrust Censorship of Economic Protest (March 1, 2010). Duke Law Journal, Vol. 59, No. 6, 2010. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1593184

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Never thought about that aspect! And stil, after reading the SSRN paper, I can't see how you can interpret the basic idea behind antitrust in the direction that action like the mentioned boycott of Cell Press in 2003 is prohited. Sorry, to bring up such concerns in the middle of boycott may prove a good undestanding of law paragraphs, but lacks any sense of what is righteous. – Christian Jun 2 '12 at 23:08
I'm not saying it's the most useful way to interpret antitrust law. But your question is why isn't there more coordinated action. The natural coordinators of action would be library associations; they're never going to do it because they're risk averse and their lawyers have told them it'd be risky. – kfortney Jun 4 '12 at 17:49
up vote 1 down vote

High-energy physics is one discipline that is exploring this through the SCOAP3 project, and there are some libraries and library consortia working on that effort. I think it is much more likely that we will see discipline-oriented efforts succeed (rather than library-oriented efforts) because the authors will be in the drivers seat making the change.

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Would be great if there will be other initiatives like SCOAP3. If the SCOAP3 will ever take off, this would probably indicated that a central coordiation like CERN is probably what is missing at all in other disciplines and in general. – Christian Jun 2 '12 at 20:36
up vote 1 down vote

Part of the reason is funding and influence from the campus rather than the profession. Academic libraries get their operating funds from their campuses, and their institution's faculty and students are their closest and most primary clientele. (Though of course not the only one.) It's extremely difficult to make a long term and wide view case for the greater good when there are everyday immediate research and teaching needs standing in your building, sending you emails, and accessing articles through your big deal subscriptions. On a daily basis, academic libraries and their directors are answerable more directly to their campus administration rather than to their profession. It takes some very strong leadership, both at the library and the campus level to be able to look beyond these more immediate needs in a systematic way. There's some of that out there, but not enough of it yet to have achieved the kind of coordination that would be necessary to make what Gowers is calling for a reality.

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I've seen librarians frankly afraid to bring the question up because of this. "The Provost doesn't approve" is a killer. – dsalo Jun 2 '12 at 15:30
The money spent on serials belongs often to the items on the the top of a library budget. And it's the item which the biggest increase every year. Wouldn't it be just appropriate for library and campus administration to approach this issue with a high priority? From all stakeholders on a campus, the library is the one with the most insight into the problematic of serial prices and Open Access. – Christian Jun 2 '12 at 20:18
Right, although in entirely too many libraries "the most insight" means "a thimbleful, maybe." Which means the job in front of us is catching everybody else up. Which means goring a lot of oxen and sacrificing a lot of sacred cows. Which has gotten librarians, including library administrators, fired. See the problem? – dsalo Jun 2 '12 at 20:55
It's absolutely an issue for libraries, but it's not clearly an issue for campuses, and that's where the money comes from. Again, of course it's an issue for campuses, but so indirectly that only the best of leaders can see through it. Libraries can't set their priorities based solely on cost increases - campus services are our public face and are critical. I'd love to see the kind of leadership that would cut through all this. I have a feeling we'l be waiting a while. – Jenn Riley Jun 2 '12 at 22:31
Is it really that hard to see the advantages of Open Access? Taking all the reports, studies a personal experience from the community, it should be easier today for a library to get commitment for an Open Access strategy than for a Facebook-page. But yes, this probably really needs leadership. When you think Open Access to the end, you’ll see radical changes for our profession ahead of us. Maybe this is frightening to some of us, and therefore we rather don’t push Open Access too hard. – Christian Jun 3 '12 at 0:23
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