Reframing the Agreement

Professor Bethany Bradley in the Department of Environmental Conservation at UMass sees an inherent problem with a for-profit publishing industry operating within the nonprofit world of academia. Bradley and colleagues in her discipline, who are paid largely by publicly-funded research universities, write articles aimed at sharing their research with natural resource managers in the field, to inform their work. In order for the resource managers to read relevant, timely material in scholarly journals, someone has to pay the publisher who stands between them. 

“High-profile journals are eating away at our ability to do science successfully and share knowledge,” says Bradley. “In the larger scheme, we pay a lot of money to buy back our own products,” she adds, referring to researchers, the university, and people of the Commonwealth ensnared by the academic publishing ecosystem. 

What has any of this got to do with you? Perhaps you’ve encountered one of life’s annoyances as you curiously peruse the internet. Aha—you find a scholarly article that addresses your exact question. Click, and up pops a box offering you a chance to pay for the resource through a one-time fee, a membership, or a subscription. Congratulations, you just hit a “paywall.” 

That annoying pay-for-access pop-up box? Unfortunately, that’s just the tip of the iceberg. The rest of the iceberg is an academic publishing ecosystem looming under the surface that has blocked the scholarly flow of information. It’s largely unseen to most users of that information, who may be paying for access in multiple ways. 

“We teach undergraduate students about this familiar roadblock all the time,” says Rebecca Reznik-Zellen, head of the Science and Engineering Library. “Junior researchers learn they have access to content paid for through the libraries’ databases, access which they won’t actually get if they only use Google.”

A paywall is not an abstract thing; a paywall is people, human beings within corporations— academic publishing corporations—who profit from restricting access to scholarly research. In most cases, the people who build and maintain paywalls and restrict how scholarship can be used and reused don’t write, evaluate, or even edit the articles; the content and the quality of the content is the work of a complex set of stakeholders: the people who conduct and evaluate research; scholarly societies that promote and publish research; the funders who sponsor it; and the scholars who share it.

In the prevailing publishing ecosystem, the top academic publishing companies (the “Big Five,” see box below, “Pushing the Bottom Line”) are able to lay claim to vast amounts of intellectual labor. That’s because historically, journals originally published in print have the longevity to develop reputation and prestige that help faculty to reach their target audiences and secure promotion and tenure.   

The printed publication of scholarly research in academic journals started out as a more straightforward economic exchange when publishers bore the costs of paper, ink, printing presses, distribution, and analog communication flows. Now that words, images, data, and ideas move around the world digitally, instantaneously, and often freely, the value the “Big Five” add to the editorial process has come under a microscope, according to Christine Turner, scholarly communication librarian. She sees a broken system in which knowledge is held hostage by corporations driven to protect profits—and even expand them—by constricting access. “They have been increasing their prices exponentially,” said Turner, “and there is no transparency in their cost models … none.” 

Authors’ salaries are just one resource in a complex academic ecosystem that supports the production of content and that are paid for by the public, in the form of tuition or taxes, as well as public and private grants. Faculty authors are supported by publicly-supported teams of researchers, data specialists, and other experts with distinct and complementary roles that produce protocols, methodologies, data, and analysis that, if widely and openly accessible, could contribute to other research, discovery, and, ultimately, knowledge, explains Turner. 

For two decades, there has been growing awareness that the tools of modern scholarly publishing—from digitization and data sharing to online networks among researchers that facilitate rapid information communication and knowledge growth—call into question traditional relationships among academic authors, publishers, and readers. “The facility with which researchers and scholars can exchange information more quickly, at a more granular level with fewer barriers, changes the landscape,” explains Turner. 

In short, publishers have been leveraging the legacy print publishing model well into the digital age, charging hefty prices for the knowledge and perspectives by authors who grew accustomed to signing away their copyright to advance their careers. 

Imagine a world where access to the latest research was available at no cost to the teacher looking for evidence-based ideas on classroom management during COVID, to the student-athlete reading up on a new theory for healing a hamstring, to your loved one diagnosed with a rare disease, to the novelist reconnoitering her genre.

A movement has grown around an array of strategies, organizations, websites, and tools to promote open access to scholarly output in ways that are much less expensive, that promote use and reuse, and favor high quality. 

A global leader in the push to raise awareness of the issue of access to information and to devise strategies for reform is the Max Planck Digital Library which serves a network of government-funded research centers in Germany. It drew a line in the sand in 2003 with the Berlin Declaration, issuing key principles around information provision, publication support, and research data management. Since then, hundreds of universities and research institutions around the world have endorsed or built upon those principles. In the United States, this includes the University of California system, MIT, the University of North Texas, Iowa State University, North Carolina State, and the University of North Carolina. All have made significant advances in negotiating with publishers. Figuring a way out of this dilemma must, of necessity, be a group effort that cuts across institutional and geographic boundaries.

UMass is next in line. In anticipation of university system-wide negotiations taking place with Elsevier in 2022, UMass is prepared. 

To fulfill the university’s mission to draw from and support diverse experiences and perspectives as a route to a more just world, the libraries formed a task force for creating a new model for negotiating with vendors. The result, a Framework for Provider Agreements, aims at building momentum for rethinking, and in some cases, revamping, how to negotiate with publishers of materials the university purchases.

The first step is reaching out to academic publishing vendors “to let them know about UMass’s new set of criteria that we’ll be bringing to the negotiating table, ones that reflect the values of the campus and libraries, and make transparent our accountability to the public,” says Breac Krash, associate dean for content and discovery. 

The Framework weighs costs against benefits for the libraries to consider before entering into a contract. Bottomline expenditures will be important, and they will be balanced with other terms, such as authors’ rights retention and users’ rights to reuse, remix, replicate and redistribute the scholarship.

Step two is bringing the faculty on board. “As producers of scholarship others profit from, faculty are key stakeholders in how a new model of scholarly communication should operate,” says Stangroom, “the Framework is designed to harness their influence to shape the ecosystem.” Sensitivity to, and even awareness of these issues, vary across disciplines, according to Turner. The need to publish in certain journals, sometimes in exchange for signing away copyright, plays itself out differently in different disciplines. 

There is also variety in how STEM, the social sciences, and the humanities are responding to new financial models of scholarly publishing. So approaches to bringing faculty into the process will vary, too.

A third prong of the university’s approach is leadership through outreach and collaboration. By publishing the Framework, UMass sends a signal to other institutions experiencing similar pressures on their budgets, letting their leaders know that they have peer support in seeking to reallocate resources. UMass is part of a larger coalition for change among forward-acting libraries in crafting contracts and agreements that will, over time, transform the relationships between producers, consumers, and purveyors of content for all institutions.

Even with the changing landscape, the libraries will continue to enter negotiations with large publishers representing thousands of titles in order to secure access to databases, data sets, journals, articles, monographs, and other fruits of academic labor as long as they are needed by the community.

Decisions on where UMass should allocate money in years to come will respond to evolving trends in publishing systems driven by researcher, faculty, and students’ needs and the growing value of open scholarship, and, if done strategically, will offer leadership in shaping these trends. Says Reznik-Zellen. With the Framework, “We’ve begun a gradual and steady shift toward a different culture of acquisition.”