Feb. 4, 2003

EDITORIAL
Control Conundrum

University Libraries, Greed, and Lethargy

By Jack Siggins

If you want to get an academic librarian’s viscera really churning, ask him or her about publishers and journal vendors. In response, you may get a churlish guffaw, a suspicious glare, or a mumbled vulgarity, depending upon the individual, but the underlying feeling is the same among almost all librarians: anger and alarm.

There is anger at the unapologetic profiteering of these companies. There is alarm at the potential threat their business practices pose for one of the most important cornerstones of our democracy: access to information.

The gap in professional philosophies between librarians and commercial vendors of information has been around a long time. For librarians, the ideal service would be to provide any information at any time to anyone for free, obviously a Utopian notion that librarians grudgingly realize cannot exist. Vendors, who control the information the librarians (and their users) want, seek to maximize profits from selling the information they control. For centuries in this country, the tension arising from these conflicting philosophies was managed by the two parties in a civilized and respectful relationship. Librarians got their books and journal subscriptions at a fair market price. Vendors and publishers made a reasonable profit. There was always a little grousing by both parties about rising costs, but for the most part, the law of supply and demand seemed to work to the benefit of both.

So what went wrong? What happened to make librarians turn against their former partners, the vendors and publishers? The steps and events leading to this condition are clear, but the root cause can be summarized in two words: greed and lethargy.

Greed
The transformation from seeking reasonable profits to price gouging began innocently enough. Authors have a right to benefit from their intellectual creations; vendors need to protect their investments in literary property rights. Changes in technology, such as the development of cheap and easy photocopying, threatened these rights. Beginning in 1976, copyright laws were changed to address those concerns. But what began largely as a response to advancements in technology that made information more widely and easily available, today has evolved into a condition in which the cooperative relationship between two evenly balanced partners in the information field has been superceded by the almost total dominance of one — the vendors — over the other — the librarians.

Companies with large lobbying resources, such as Disney, have been successful in convincing government agencies, courts, and legislatures to extend their control over some intellectual property, rather than release them to the public domain. Copyright laws have been changed. Laws have been passed in state legislatures as well as in Congress. The Uniform Computer Information Transactions Act (UCITA) was developed by publishers and vendors to use as a model for state legislatures to pass. UCITA would give vendors the authority to force libraries to narrowly restrict access to their materials, bar photocopying, and eliminate interlibrary loans. These same vendors for years also have aggressively threatened to take to court any institution that the vendors say have violated their particular interpretation of the vague and broadly written fair use clause of the copyright laws.

Today, the vast majority of both hardcopy and electronic journals required by academic institutions for their libraries are owned or controlled by a small group of mostly international vendor companies, such as Reed Elsevier. As they have extended their control, they have escalated annual price increases by as much as 35-50 percent, in some cases, while imposing severe restrictions on access, copying, and interlibrary loan. Even academic organizations, such as the American Chemical Society, have assumed these practices in order, they admit, to make money.

Lethargy
Ironies abound from this situation. Faculty depend upon libraries mostly to provide access to the journals they need for research and instructions. Libraries have to decide whether to pay outrageously high subscription costs from budget allocations from university administrations that are having trouble with rising costs themselves. Faculty criticize university administrators about non-support of library collection budgets made worse by the high subscription costs and complain to librarians about restrictions on copying and such services as reserves. And yet faculty are the sources of the very articles that are printed in the publications controlled by the vendors charging the high prices.

The vendors and publishers have figured this out. They know that faculty and research authors are disinclined to intervene with their own societies to stop handing over control of their own journals to commercial vendors. They know universities are loath to take on lawsuits from vendors. They know that legislators are easy to convince through misinformation, lobbying, and re-election contributions.

Library organizations such as the Association of Research Libraries, working with a few organizations such as the AAU, have fought back by increasing their own lobbying campaign and by encouraging the development of alternative academic publications that charge more reasonable prices. Academic consortia, such as the Washington Research Library Consortium, have joined forces and combined resources to counter the power of the big vendors.

But a significant effort still needs to be made by faculty and researchers. At some point, they need to take back the copyrights on their own articles and urge their professional societies not to sell publishing rights to the oligopoly of vendors. Until all of us are actively engaged in this effort, one of the most basic cornerstones of our democracy — open access to information — will continue to be seriously eroded.


Jack Siggins is the University librarian.

 

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