Perception of the Big Deal one year on (Monday PM)

Jill Taylor Roe had her work cut out running a discussion-based workshop in the not very intimate surroundings in the Pentland Auditorium. She started by presenting plenty of evidence that budget pressures are starting to bite.

A survey of Nesli colleagues showed a rough 50/50 split between those happy and unhappy with big deals. Those unhappy complained about

• lack of options in adding/excluding content
• increased costs
• hard to find money for non big deals

An ALPSP 2009 survey showed high renewal rates for big deals, but cancellations and downgrades to subject clusters were starting to increase. A CIBER survey from 2009

The Economic Downturn and Libraries [pdf] noted that academic libraries expect to reduce budgets and reduce spending on information resources, going beyond efficiency savings into real cuts.

From a UK perspective, currency rates have improved since last Jan/Feb, and so far libraries generally haven't cancelled big deals. Some publishers have shown sensitivity in terms of zero price increases, but librarians' wish list of improvements still haven't been met (eg deals not based on historical print spend, easier to switch to e-only, more flexibility).

There are still hard times ahead: library budgets are at best static (meaning cuts in real terms) whereas Swets are forecasting 5% increases in journal costs on average. Many people in the room felt that 2010 was better than expected but 2011 may be a worse year, certainly in the UK, as one-off funding and emergency measures come to an end.

Were any solutions offered during the discussion?

• Agents/intermediaries may be in a position to help both sides, especially where there are language/cultural differences between publishers and libraries
• The library community needs to send price messages to publishers in same way consumers do: are they willing to walk away from deals, and force re-negotiation of terms?
• Is Open Access an answer? Libraries are paying out to publishers on both sides at the moment, and take up of open access for the biggest STM publishers is still tiny compared to overall costs
• Would wholesale migration to e-only reduce library operating costs in a significant way? Only up to a point, since eventually print processing is minimised and as much as possible switched to e-only. Necessary staff for managing e-resources tend to be at a higher level compared to print, not to mention that budget for staff and resources are often in separate pots and libraries cannot use one to pay for the other.

What's the one thing which participants thought would make things easier?

• UK libraries negotiating jointly like Scandinavia, Germany etc, and as SHEDL are doing in Scotland.
• Most people don't want to see big deals abolished but they need to be smaller and more flexible.
• Would document delivery models be an answer? They would have to be financially viable. Pay per view has proved to be more expensive than individual subscriptions and big deals in many cases.
• Zero VAT on electronic books/journals would help (although others felt that an overall increase in VAT was a more likely scenario)

It was obvious from the discussion that there wasn't a straightforward answer, and also noticeable that although there were many vocal librarians, there weren't many voices in the room representing the major STM publishers.

Plenary session 2: Economics of Scholarly Information

Ted Bergstrom
Big Deals and the Terrible Fix

Ted started by describing librarians' “shopping problems"

• Delegation: Librarians are making choices for consumers who aren't spending their own money – 'the university' pays
• Unreliable signals: Arguments for subscriptions are fervid but not always reliable
• Complexity: Libraries face all or nothing complex deals, and when there are large numbers of titles covering 100+ disciplines, who can say what it's worth?
• Monopoly: Journals represent price inelastic demand, i.e. demand doesn't vary according to price (much like the prescription drug industry)

The first big deals entailed a publisher (roughly speaking) working out the library's current spend, multiplying by a factor, and then offering e-access to all content in addition to the print for existing subscriptions.

How effective was this? Very, since the publisher knows that the library is willing to pay at least same as they did for their paper subscriptions, and giving them additional content costs the publisher nothing. Bundling works well from a seller's perspective: demand for bundles varies less than individual titles, and deters entry to the market by making it hard to add new competing journals. And of course, by the time the deal expires, the faculty are addicted to online access so the library has to negotiate a new deal.

Ted then gave the audience an economic prescription: namely, if you want to allocate resources efficiently, use a price system where users pay for what they get out of their own money, and therefore economise, ie a pay per view model. If informed users spend their own money on downloads, demand becomes more price elastic, monopolists are forced to cut prices, and authors prefer to publish in reasonably priced journals in order to get more readers.

Does it work for academics? Ask yourself: who else is better placed to decide value of article access?

Currently there's a big discrepancy between the average cost of a non-profit and for-profit article. The competition prediction suggests that if users pay, it would drive down prices to just over cost-price. There could be limited role of central purchase, where libraries could subscribe to journals which cost no more than 1.5 times as much as the average non-profit journals and allow their users free access.

What can one library do?

• Consider dropping big deal subscriptions to overpriced journals
• Maintain subscriptions to reasonably priced journals, at zero cost to end users
• Subsidise user-pays models (not to their full cost though)

Marybeth Manning
Reset: a publisher's response to the changing economy

SPIE have taken the “unusual” step of reducing institutional subscription prices to their Digital Library by 10%, because they believed there would be sustained impact on scholarly publishing from changing publishing models and economic crises.

SPIE are a not for profit international society for optics and photonics: their Digital Library contains journals, conference proceedings and books. The subscription model is tiered (with different criteria for academic, government and corporate customers) and was originally based on print pricing.

Their objective is optimal dissemination of information, but it must be sustainable: a balance of reach and revenues. SPIE decided that their tier model was acceptable and understood, but penalised smaller institutions or large institutions with few relevant programmes. Corporations preferred price per use, and overall the cost per use for low tiers too high. Combined with environmental factors (the global economic crisis) they decided on overall price reductions on full DL subscriptions and topical segments (not including consortia or single subscriptions). They also added a 5th tier for the smallest organisations, and allowed introductory discounts to enable institutions to test interest. So far renewal levels have stayed strong, and they have good levels of new business, especially in lower tiers.

Does it apply to wider community?
SPIE wanted to shift their business model rather than have it shifted for them by factors outside their control, and believe that market growth and user demand will support reduced prices in future. They “want to be seen as part of the solution not the problem”.

But does this affect anything when big deals/mega publishers are so dominant? If libraries won't vote with their feet (or with their £) then who is to blame?

Carol Tenopir
University investments in the library: measuring the return

How does the library demonstrate its value to the university and its scholarship?
How can value be measured?

• implicit value – downloads, usage
• explicit value – testimonials, researchers' purpose in using library services
• derived values – Return on Investment (ROI)

Derived measures: A way to show that the library contributes to the income generating activity of the university ie for every £ spent on the library, the university received £ in return. One way is to look at money spent on collections and then money coming back in grants.

Grant cycle => conduct research – write articles – write reports and proposals – obtain grants – conduct research etc. Libraries have already been connected to all steps aside from obtaining grants: this is key unknown.

University of Illinois did a phase 1 study funded by Elsevier which found $4.38 grant income for each $1 invested in the library (based on the % of faculty who rated citations in proposals as important in their success x % of proposals funded/library budget). Their findings have been published in a white paper.

Phase 2 expanded the methodology from phase 1 across 8 institutions in 8 countries – does it still apply? (But remember that ROI numbers do not tell the full story)

Library ROIs fell into three distinct tiers:

• STM research institutions: up to 15.5 to 1
• Research/teaching institutions STM/Humanities/Social Sciences: up to 3.4 to 1 (most common category)
• Research and teaching all disciplines, not so much emphasis on external funding: less than 1 to 1

The project also did surveys of faculty about importance of citations and amount of reading, collected comments from faculty on use and importance of e-collections, and did interviews with university administration. They found lots of positive comments about value of e-resources in research, teaching, scholarship eg facilitates interdisciplinary work, better productivity.

Universities' administration staff also said they wanted the library to help them:

• attract/retain outstanding faculty (studies have shown a relationship between reading more library resources, publishing more, getting more grants: typical profile of 'star' faculty members)
• foster innovative research (bearing in mind that the number of articles cited will be much lower than those read)
• build research reputation of institution (some cases have shown positive relationship between library funding and amount of successful grants)
• promote seamless integration of the library with institutional research activities (some studies have shown a positive relationship between article downloads and research productivity)

Phase 3 (LibValue project) will be looking at more complex areas of library's value to teaching/learning, and social/professional activities. ARL will be involved in disseminating tools and measures. They recognise that they also need to look at new scholarly endeavours – e-science, collaborative scholarship, institutional repositories.

Conclusion

• It's possible to tie library e-collections to faculty productivity
• Libraries help generate grants income
• ROI for grants varies according to the mission and location of university
• Value can be measured in many ways

How to make your IR effective as a publishing platform for grey literature

"I know nothing about IRs", admits Toby Green, "but I once wrote a paper about tidying up our grey literature at OECD, which seems to have garnered a lot of interest." Today he tells us he'll cover:

• Post-it-and-hope-Google-finds-it approaches to dissemination of content
• What does it take to satisfy the needs of various stakeholders
• What did the OECD do with its working papers

Post and hope
Out of 40 starters at this year's Grand National, 14 finished. Rank outsiders enter what is one of the country's hardest courses - perhaps hoping that everyone else will fall over and allow the rank outsider to win. Is "post it and hope" an equally unlikely strategy for success? It relies on a single discoverability system (search) which puts considerable pressure on metadata to be of sufficient quality to drive successful discovery. And it's a "survival of the fittest" environment: if you are not part of the "short head" (the blockbuster opposite of the long tail) your chances of discovery through major search engines are also limited. It's a passive strategy that is author-, rather than reader-centric. Ultimately, says Toby, it doesn't work. The OECD.org website is a platform for authors to upload their content - which they do - and 90% of it is *never* downloaded.

Stakeholder needs
What do the various stakeholder groups require from literature repositories? As a group - made up of representatives from libraries, publishers, agents, intermediaries - we brainstormed some of the things that different user groups require from a publishing system.

Authors

• need a channel for dissemination
• need visibility/recognition for career development
• need to be read
• need to claim ownership of ideas
• need to fulfil mandates (from funders, institutions)
• need an easy process, preferably with others doing as much as possible
• need reports on how the work has been used
• need archiving
• need links/dissemination to other platforms where they want to be visible/involved
  

Readers

• need full text but don't want to have to read it
  
• need integration with other workflow tools
• need easy discoverability - and access - for free
• need related data and inter-literature links
• need an indication that the content is authoritative
• need reliability/predictability of content's location
• need awareness and other contextual services

Institutional administrators; bosses

• need reports on usage, financial aspects (value for money), who has been published
• need prominent branding / enhancement of reputation
• need budget - and usage - a critical mass of deposits
  
• need quality to meet institution's standards and reduce later work

Librarians

• need more time, resource and better equipment
  
• need training
• need standards
• need tools to support processes
• need clearer legal guidelines from publishers
  

Funders

• need reports (on usage/what's been published) to show that grants are producing sufficient material
• need visibility, research profile
  
• need dissemination to expedite ongoing research

Intermediaries

• agents
• aggregators
• publishers need copyright and brand to be respected/protected; credit where due

What did the OECD do to meet these needs?
Originally, authors could post what they wanted, when they wanted. Readers, however, struggled to find this material. Administrators were concerned about quality control and reputation; funders were asking questions about impact and ROI. Librarians - were laughing - despairingly? Authors weren't asking for OECD's assistance; administrators didn't think it had anything to do with OECD. Papers were presented in a jumble on the OECD website

• no metadata standards
• no quality control
• no underlying database/workflow
• no common vision
• no knowledge of what readers need
• no understanding of discovery systems
  

OECD's solution was to get the publishing staff involved to

• establish metadata standards
• establish quality control steps
• create underlying database/workflow
• build common vision
• research readers'/librarian needs
• exploit discovery systems
• monitor results.

Metadata is key:

• analyse the papers to identify metadata fields
• add additional fields to meet industry standards
• sign off fields so database can be built
• QA existing metadata; fix numbering problems
• Fill and QA the database

OECD then created a workflow to minimise effort and create efficiencies - converting the paper to a PDF for hosting and onward dissemination. A single webpage now categorises the papers and links through to organised lists of papers within categories. Metadata is consistent and comprehensive (DOI, abstracts, keywords etc.), and is submitted to RePEc - vastly improving that database's coverage of this content, since authors had previously not been diligent in uploading their own content. And at the full text level, the workflow system adds a templated cover page with improved, consistent branding and clear, exportable citations.

Following this overhaul of the workflow, traffic to the working papers has more than doubled.

• authors needs are being met: data is more visible in more locations, the data is marketed within the OECD platform, reports are available from OECD and its partner platforms, and authors are not required to carry out any of the processes
• readers can access the full text and improved metadata helps them understand it without reading it, citations can be exported, content is discoverable, background data is linked, citation linking and "more like this" links are forthcoming, the content is clearly trustworthy and well serviced with awareness alerting
• administrators can download usage reports and assess financial value, branding has improved, quality is controlled (inappropriate content is rejected)
• librarians are not required to carry out any of the processes, legal guidance is clear
• funders are getting good value for money without additional expenditure.

In conclusion:

• QA - requires filtering to protect institution's reputation
• Distribute to disseminate - content needs to be widely discoverable with supporting capabilities such as MARC records
• Promotion - internal awareness-raising with authors so they understand why the process is valuable to them
• Reports and 'ego' tools (RePEc has good ones); reader tool
• Institutional repositories need to either outsource to a publisher, or employ people with publishing skills to manage the process effectively
  

What kind of publishers will we see by 2015?

Questions at the end of the morning's session were encouraged, in a novel twist, by Muir Gray's insistence that all delegates should turn to their neighbour and discuss the morning's findings. An interesting question that grew out of this: what kind of publishers will we see by 2015?

Huge consolidation in the industry, says James Grey. Publishers will start to serve very specific communities with content absolutely tailored to them, with better services than currently offered. Kevin Guthrie adds that the publishing environment will look more like eBay - a range of decentralised services, whether around credentialing or other, diverse aspects of the research process. Just as eBay requires seller ranking and ecommerce services, publication services will revolve around infrastructure platforms which will enable local enterprises to create niche markets (subcommunities) to grow alongside the major consolidated players.