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Ask a Librarian about Collections Development in an Open World
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Ask a Librarian about Collections Development in an Open World
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Welcome to today's Ask the experts panel. We are pleased you can join our discussion on library collections development. I'm David Meyers, special education committee member and a lead publisher at Wolters kluwer. Before we begin, I want to thank our 2023 education sponsors, Mary Kay silver chair, 67 bricks and Taylor Francis f 1,000.
We are grateful for their support. A few housekeeping items. Phones have been muted, so please use the Q&A panel to enter questions for the panelists. Our agenda is to cover whatever questions you have, so don't be shy about asking. This one hour session will be recorded and available following today's broadcast. A quick note on SSPS code of conduct.
In today's meeting. We are committed to equity, diversity and providing an inclusive meeting environment, fostering open dialogue, free of harassment, discrimination and hostile conduct. We ask all participants whether speaking or in chat to consider and debate relevant viewpoints in an orderly, respectful and fair manner.
It is now my pleasure to introduce today's moderator, Neil Christiansen meles, the head of public relations for knowledge unlatch and o'boyle. He has a 20 plus year career in scholarly publishing and information services, holding a range of prior roles in partnerships, business development, sales and editorial for Scholarly Publishing and technology organizations, including monks, guard, Blackwell nature publishing group, Wiley University of California Press and solo cactus Research Square company and as a consultant.
His core areas of interest are B2B partnerships with publishers and universities, AI and software, enterprise sales and open access services. In his current role, he focuses on the publisher relationships related to obo, the open access management solution for institutions and knowledge unlatched open access crowdfunding, the brokering of support between institutions and publishers. And now over to email.
Oh, Thank you, David, and Thank you, everyone for joining us here today. We have the pleasure of being joined by Daisy Kelley and Robin to ask about collections development in an open world. And I'll ask the three of you to introduce yourselves in a minute. But first, to set the scene for people joining. This is an ask the expert session.
So ideally, we would like for it to be driven by the questions from people in the Q&A feature that you will see at the bottom of your screen. I think this is a fantastic opportunity to ask all sorts of questions about how openness or open access, if you will, affects and is affected by how libraries acquire and support scholarly content. So let's kick it off with asking Daisy, Kelley and Robin to briefly introduce yourselves while people start typing up questions.
And maybe we can start with you, Daisy. Good evening from South Africa. It's Daisy Marcella. And I'm the University librarian at the University of the witwatersrand, which is based in Johannesburg. And my University is one of the top research intensive University in South Africa and one of the universities that looking at rankings and it's amongst the top ranking visitors in the world.
I work as the University librarian at the University. And my previous involvement has been also in University library management. I was previously at the University of South Africa, which is the largest, biggest distance learning University in Africa with over 370,000 students. But the library was the biggest in Africa and the biggest academic lab in Africa, and we always compared it with the Alexandria library.
So when we talk about collection development, it's quite a call to how do we actually address all these issues, especially when you are looking at distance learning and students who are coming from all over the world and with your oldest student being a graduate, graduating at the age of 90 years. And I would just want to give the context that the University of South Africa, including where I am now, the University of the witwatersrand, that's where Nelson Mandela studied and with my role at the University of South Africa, also as part of collection development there in the archives, we also had the letters from Nelson Mandela and the assignments because he was incarcerated, as we all know, in South Africa is the only country where when you are in jail, you are allowed to study.
And he's one of those politicians and some of our incarcerated students, they study through our University and they qualify and they graduate. And we I pride myself from Africa saying that we were lucky that we went through apartheid. And this also links to access when we talk about now collections, openness, open communities, because now we are able to make those collections available for people to see Nelson Mandela's writings as a student, his assignments that were, you know, put away that nobody's supposed to see this and that.
So for today's session, I'm looking forward to discussing and hearing the comments also from how we live in a global society. And I will also share my perspective on collective development from the global South. And I serve on a number of international bodies, especially the international science council, where we look at open data and open science. And I've been in this body for the past 16 years.
Thank you, colleagues. Hey Thank you so much, Stacey. Kelly, you want to go next? Sir hi, I'm Kelly densa. I'm from Davidson College in North Carolina. We're just North of Charlotte. I'm at Davidson College is a small liberal arts college that supports around 2000 students.
We're all undergraduates and around 220 faculty members. I've been here for five years overseeing the tech aspects of electronic resources and discovery systems, but also managing the acquisitions and budget as it relates to resources and open initiatives. I'm excited to be here today. I feel a bit like a small fish in a big pond. Are publishing activity at Davidson puts us in the red category of free to publish agreements.
We participate in our states consortium and rely on the uncw universities publishing power for ABC based deals that are negotiated on behalf of the consortium. We're committed to supporting collections and publishing at the college and in the library through sustainable, equitable models, and I look forward to today's discussion. Thank you very much, Kelly and Robin.
Hello I'm Robinson. I currently work at the Iowa State University library in the middle of the United the continental United States. I've been here for about 18 months. Previously, I was a science librarian and then turned into a scholarly communications librarian.
And now I'm the director of collections and open strategies, a job which melds my scholarly communication open access, open science knowledge with learning how to manage a collection quickly. So force Fed. So I'm really interested in this conversation because openness impacts collections and all the d-ii and equitably, equitably discussions impact all of that. So this will be a really interesting conversation, especially with publishers here.
Well, Thank you all. There are no questions yet in the Q&A field. So, of course, we come prepared. We have some questions prepared, but please don't be shy. But let me kick off with a first one here and. The decisions to support the voices of some authors and disciplines over others are everyday challenges in collections development.
How do libraries decide what content to acquire and support, or who voices whose voices to support in an open world? And maybe we can start with you, Robin. OK so. Libraries, put together policies, guidelines and processes for pulling information in. We started with having to have only tangible materials, and that's broadened to pulling in online and streaming and.
Microfilm and manuscript collections. The whole nine yards. Most libraries first priority will be the local needs of their local community for whom they whom serve. We get our money as an academic library from the University. Universities, research and learning needs are the priority.
Iowa State is a public University. So then after that, because we're funded by the state, it becomes, what do the citizens of Iowa need? And then, of course, open. So the whole open scholarship has Fed right into that great open society need. So we want to support content open or close that supports what happens on our campus and then what happens in Iowa.
We want to make our research openly available in return. So that people can use it across the globe. We want to support open infrastructure that aligns with our values, and we also want to represent marginalized communities and our collections. So that means we have to keep revisiting whatever policies we create to update them as things change in this ever changing world.
Thank you. Kelly Daisy, we have thoughts on this. Yes from my side. I think I do understand what Robin highlighted. From our side, we are looking at the infrastructure issues. Other than infrastructure issues. When you look also at the skills and the competencies that you have with the understanding of the narrative around open, open science and open access and how it links to your collection and the adoption of any mandate that comes forward and who's championing that mandate?
Remember, as librarians, when we come up, if we take, for example, the issues around repositories. We started with that and we had to run with it when we look at data. We are not the producers of data, but we need to make sure that we collate, we make sure that it's available. It's available, and that impacts on our standing within our institutions, whether it's a public library, a community library or an academic library.
But when we look at academic libraries, it's quite critical the understanding of why we do certain things in collection, development and collection management. For me, there's a difference between collection development and collection management, and it's quite key for us to understand that. And that also enforces our policies. And what I've picked up is that the.
As information professionals, we tend to stagnate when it comes to policies and we don't want to move out because things have been done like this. This is the policy and this is how we are going to acquire without looking at the needs of the users. Academic libraries per se. I from the global South.
We have to be blamed because we listen to what the course content is all about from that, from the researcher, for example. I want this. And we saw that with COVID. The past two years of COVID actually showed us that because then the publishers came to the fore and said, these are the open source access publications that are databases that you can access for free and libraries make them available.
And we had to run like headless chickens to make sure that. However, when it comes to the budgeting internally, we budget to say we need so much for resources, whether it's e tools, e databases and hard copies and so forth. Then you have the gatekeepers where you have your own researchers who want the collections, but they are saying no, but why is the library getting more money?
And that's why we see also the cuts in our budget. Because the life begets money to ensure that we have adequate resources. And when you go to the table. To fight for funding. Then the issues come. Oh, the dinner recess. Why do you have so much funding for the library? But they are forgetting about the costs.
And that's also the issue of the publishers come into play. Because we have the publisher at stake, we have the academic at stake or the researcher in the library here, and the budget goes to the library. The researcher determines what needs to be in the. The publishers, they do have license agreements and we are also impacted by the cost of the rent dollar euro exchange that we have to deal with. And it puts us in the middle.
Because when you as part of your policy changes, you say, remember, how do we address? I saw a question around language. You know any connections in the chatted about language how as librarians when we need to come forward and say we need to look at the content that we put on our shelves or that we have electronically. The issue is, who are you? Because I'm the faculty, dean, and I decide what needs to be there and that needs to change.
And that's what we are trying to drive to ensure that our collections encapsulates what our users require. Yes I go to three years ago, I made a presentation where I was talking about the genre of collections that we have in South Africa and in particular one particular library, which is a University library which appeals collections.
However, we had more eurocentric collections and when you look at the population, for example, in South Africa. The dynamics and the population, Black versus white population is different, but we still have the collections that were collected in the apartheid days and the collection that needs to be on the shelves are not there. And then we have the gatekeepers.
So I just wanted to highlight that. And if most of you don't know, I would rise or rise indicate that in 2018, South African higher education, all the universities had an uprising in 2018 that changed the landscape of how we collect. How do we have a collection development and collection management? The students went out there and fought for decolonizing. Universities, decolonizing curricula.
And us as librarians, as knowledge practitioners, we have to come to the table and say, what do they actually mean? If a student comes to your library and says, but I'm looking for a book on Chinua achebe, or a book about four South Africans by a South African Writer. And you don't have it. But I find a book about, you know, the history of how Cape town, how the Cape of Good hope, which is now Cape Town.
And we have that. How do we deal with it? So I just wanted to highlight and this also impacts on our public libraries because also how do we populate with the languages that are spoken? For what you would call minority communities. The indigenous communities. How do we connect that? I just wanted to touch base on that.
So it gets impacted by the infrastructure, the budget's part. From the publishing side. Also, there is a linkage. And also from the research site and the researchers. Yeah Thank you. Hey, Thank you, Daisy. So that sort of triggers questions around like representation and underrepresented communities.
And there is a question here. Access may be limited by internet access and primary language, which is what is done to be more inclusive and on this inclusiveness. Like how do we think about. Like the voices of early career researchers, contingent faculty, independent researchers, unaffiliated scholars who in the way that a lot of open access is done today, may find no or very limited possibility for institutional support in open access.
And so maybe marrying that with that question about what is done to be more inclusive. Kelly, is there something you want you have in mind for that question? Sure I can add a little bit. I agree with everything that was said earlier about collection development because I was as much the same way. We're actually a faculty driven collection.
So our kind of official papers of the college mandate that the faculty are the ones that drive our collections. So we base what we purchase or give access to on what the courses that are being taught for each semester. So luckily we have a diverse faculty pool, we have diverse student pool that are looking for research topics that are quite diverse. So we are able to provide a good selection of that.
One of the things that's backing us up, however, is that because it's faculty driven, we're hesitant to get rid of things. So we have a second floor that's filled with Dewey classified books that haven't checked out in 20 years. And we're about to embark on a new student or a new library. So for us, it's a lot of, OK, we need to get rid of this print, especially this older print that's not being used anymore, get it online, get online access to it.
So we partner with a lot of consortium and different organizations that bring shared collections together. That's really important for us, especially as a small library. And that also, I think, helps bring some inclusivity into what we're able to provide to our researchers, just inherently in that. And then as far as the question about junior faculty or faculty that might not be as funded early career, we are really eager to support them, especially in the humanities.
We're basically a we're a heavy humanities school, but we also have science programs. But it's our humanities faculty that have the biggest problem, I think, with funding. And so we partner with lever press, which is AI think it's an OH monograph press to help our authors give them some sort of kind of pathway towards publishing a monograph. And then as I mentioned, our ABC deals and those types of things that we rely on through our consortiums.
Thank Thank you. Kelly and robin, we chatted very briefly a bit about this just before the call started. Right like this. The support system or network for researchers who sort of sit outside or in between institutions or younger or contingent. And what are your thoughts about like representing the voices of these early career researchers when they don't necessarily have access to funding, or they may be disciplines in the humanities where, you know, there isn't much grant funding that will support any type of apks or pieces.
Right well. It's kind of. We're talking two sides of a. A point. I mean, the people that don't have a home institution that has a library need access to paywalled content. They can. And if they have an internet connection. They can get to the open content, which may or may not be enough or in the areas that they want.
So just trying to make more and more content openly available through subscribe to open through things like lever press or fun to mission for books or things like that will make more and more information hopefully as time progresses freely available for internet capable, non institutionally related people. When you think about making sure underrepresented voices in whatever geographic area you're talking about have the ability to publish.
That's a slightly different. Conversation that's where the whole current APC, the current idea of an APC model. Ties an author to an institution to have funding, whereas things like subscribe to open or like fund admission or things like that or diamond journals. Allow a. An untethered researcher to publish without having to pay the APC.
So we're trying. We don't have much money, but we're trying to spread it thinly, but across all of those ways to try to hit all of those communities. It's hard, but we're trying. OK from my side, if I can add, from the global South perspective. With regards to the collection development question that you ask about the early researchers and family clarity regarding the institutional support for.
OK I think for us it has been important with regards to the adoption of open access policies within our institutions. And we were lucky in South Africa that the government itself was pushing for this through the Ministry of Science and Technology for the past 10 years. And I can say now it's going through our parliament legislature.
In December we had an international science meeting, international science meeting held in Cape town, where government was finalizing with all African leaders, including some European countries, with, for example, the Dutch funding agency, the German funding agency. We also had the NSSF you are familiar with the NSSF and it was driven by also my former employer institution, the National Science Foundation of South Africa, which is an ambit of the Ministry.
And we have now an open, open science. Policy for the country. And they were trying to make it inclusive. And we've been involved in that to a. Address Africa, not just South Africa, because we noticed that our researchers. Permeable we have researchers coming from Nigeria, Kenya to South Africa, and also the funding agency also supports collaboration and partnerships when they publish.
So I just want to highlight that for us, that's good traction. And the fact that we have a consortium of University provosts or what do you call them, presidents that also supports our consortium of librarians where I'm currently the chair. When we talk about the issues I saw about transformative agreements, issues around open data, open science, open access, including open innovation, and now we're talking about transformative agreements.
And I must just highlight to you that when it came to transformative agreements for the 2023 cycle negotiations that we were busy with in 2022, we made breakthroughs for Southern Africa. With publishers globally. I won't mention some names, but you know, some of them where we put our foot down on what we want on our terms from the global South. A typical example is that you can't buy.
Folks back in. You remember the 1966 folks folks work and those beautiful wines, Neal and expected to be driven the same way in the potholes in Africa like it's driven in Germany. And that's what the publishers are doing with us. And I they are. Publishers are, but I have to be frank, that's our analogy. So to drive that forward, what we did as the consortium, the South African library consortium, we then came up.
With principles that we are negotiating on. And we drafted those principles. They were approved. We sent them to our University provost consortium. They were approved and supported that. We are standing firm. We are supported by high levels of all of our universities when it comes to the issues around what we are talking about access now and how it's going to address issues of equity.
And I just want to highlight that as part of our issues around how we dealt with these issues, around transformative agreements, on how do we look. For course, there's a question there that I think we can address it now that we looked at our what we call social justice principles. For South Africa, South Africa that are non-negotiable. And here we are looking at promoting accessibility to local research, which is crucial for accumulating and developing a corpus of local knowledge for growth and development of African society and the true ambit of what we are looking at here.
We are looking at that. Publishers must have an equity and inclusion plan that will address challenges of researchers in the global South. A typical example of our publishers, they publish on local issues. Malaria now we talk about climate change. We have a lot of bees in the southern part of South Africa that migrate.
And we have research, as I used to when I was at the National spending agency, I came to Noah in Washington because of data management activities that I was involved in. Who comes to South Africa and collect the data? The data goes there on bees, but the bees are migrating South Africa. So we're looking at the issues around when we say what publishers must be doing, when we look at social justice with a.
Researchers and authors. You need to. When we publish the rejection rate that we receive from Africa, it goes back again to the issue of language. And it's not that we don't write. We know how to write English. We write the queen's language. We don't write American language.
I just want to make it clear we write pure English. But the rejection rate, because the content is not what the publisher wants. We are addressing social issues that are in the SDGS. And that's where we are. When we talk about social justice, we are looking holistically at all these things. Also, the review process. How do you come in as publishers and mentor?
Review us. How do you come in as publishers and come up with developmental programs? That's what we are spending on currently in South Africa and it's a non-negotiable. When we look again at the issues of social justice, we actually want the deconstruction of structures that perpetuates inequality, exclusion and marginalization.
Secondly, we want from the publishing side to look at reconstruction of the structures that advances equity. And I think that clarifies that we are all contributing to this global. Scholarship process. However, how do we address the inequalities? There was a comment about internet access. It's a challenge.
I'm involved in a project with Qatar through my university, where we have other universities up in Africa that are working with us. And now in February months we'll be having a workshop to address 400 students who are working through my University who are from other African countries because they don't have resources. And that's where that issue around collaboration, which resources you make available and so forth.
And Carter, we are using that as a tool to ensure that institutions, for example, or bodies like research for life actually assist those other for access. And I can talk more about all these issues, but I just want to highlight that it's quite important that for us, when you talk about scholarly communication environment, it addresses all the different biases geography, language, peer reviews, everything.
I just wanted to highlight that and we transformative agreements. We don't want to take up as it is, but we want it to address our needs. And so forth. Yeah Thank you. Yeah, Thank you, Daisy. Yeah, for sure. There are some like some deep rooted issues around representation.
And I think we'll come back to them in a second. I just I see there's some questions here and maybe we'll just get through some of them. And one here says, in a world with increasing open access science, what are your priorities for maintaining, prioritizing scientific journal subscriptions? I think with days, right, you're like, well, there's a perpetuation of some unequal balances. And Kelly Robin so that question.
I can tackle it first. So to be honest, we don't have anything. Written out right now. We have a new ad for collections that starting in February, we have a new collections committee structure that's going to be here at the library. And these are all things that I've been kind of having to deal with on my own and now is going to be brought to a larger group.
So that it's not all put on me or me or that me and the director. Like I said, a lot of what we do has to do with what the faculty want, what the faculty want access to for their research, and what the faculty want access to as far as students. So that's a huge. Think for us, but also knowing that scientific journal subscriptions are really expensive and any way we can knock down some of those expenses, we will do it.
I think. So we or the Iowa State University of science and technology. We have to keep adding that into our licenses. Everyone wants to cut it off. So we are we have a big engineering school. We have agriculture, veterinary medicine. So we are very focused on science.
We're into experimentation and supporting experimentation here. What we want to do, given all the changes in the last 4 to five years and what may happen in the future is. We're not tied. To continuing to support. Any particular set of scientific journals.
Unless they directly support the research and the learning that goes on here. What we want to do is support open scholarship. And if that means taking and we've already done this, taking money away from subscription journals to shift it to. Subscribe to open agreements, diamond journals. We have 20 transformative or read and publish agreements for trying different models of read and publish.
We're in a couple of different conversations where we're leaving poor publishers going, really? You really, really want to do it that way? We're like, yeah, we really, really want to do it that way. So and we're also at the point where now with in physics and some of the other sciences that have a high uptake of open, we're starting to see we're reaching that tipping point which I know scares publishers have to death enough of the content is open we can fill in the rest with it in our library alone, in our back files.
We're starting to cancel those subscriptions. And so. That's why my job title is director of collections and open strategies. This is going to be a bumpy ride, and we're going to try to be as kind to everybody as we can. But what we want to do is make sure that open scholarship, the whole nine yards, whether it's preprint servers, we support several preprint servers.
We Subpart F 1,000. We want to make the infrastructure, the data, the metadata, everything open, vetted, linked up. So we're trying to figure out what this next iteration of the ecosystem is going to look like. And I know none of us know what it's going to look like, but we're trying.
Yeah, that makes you think a bit about also what Daisy said before we touched on transformative agreements. And now there's a question here from Judy Luther, who says funding. To what extent is your library interested involved in transformative agreements? Are there funds provided by the library to underwrite open access fees for authors whose research is not funded?
And I have like and an additional context to that I also wonder about. Right and that's. And when we talk about transformative agreements Daisy was mentioning before, right, with maybe some very big players. But but what are we doing with the 100 or the thousands of publishers who are too small to go into transformative agreements with institutions or consortia where they say, we're not interested, we don't have enough sort of affinity with each other.
Right? but if you look at their impact cumulatively, there is a very long tail of research that is sitting with smaller publishers to sort fall under a threshold of critical mass. So I know that's a lot to pack in, but maybe we could start sort of with Judy's question. Right are there funds provided by the library to underwrite underwrite open access fees for authors whose research is not funded?
Daisy how do you go about that? But from our side in South Africa, we don't find all our universities from the library side, we don't budget for apcs. The APC are budgeted buy from the faculty side with the research office. So there is a pot of money that funded budgeted for APC. And then in my current institution now I was surprised when I got there that the library has to administer apcs and article processing charges.
And I said, but who does that in South and in South africa? We don't do that. Why are you doing that? You know, a librarian who's qualified must be now doing administrative work of counting center and rents. And it's not, you know, so I'm winning that out based on the argument I put forward. But we don't budget.
The budget comes through and it comes into our information resources budget. It's there and we report on. How it's going out. But I don't budget for that. Yeah, but the other caveat for us is that in South Africa, with the host democracy coming from apartheid, there's a lot of good that was done by the Nelson Mandela government when he came into power to address the inequality in education.
Was that any researcher or any person who publishes affiliated to an academic institution? They publish, and we have the Ministry of Higher Education. There's a policy also there. They get what you call a rebate when you publish. You get money. An article that you publish, you get money that goes into your faculty and you can decide how to use that money to get more students on board to pay for scholarships or to buy equipment for students or for yourself, for your own research.
And that has been a carrot and stick to ensure that they publish. But now the issue has been why then are you addressing that? It must just be high impact factor journals. And it comes back to those small publishers. How do we address the small publishers? If now the Ministry of Higher Education says it must be in high impact journals. So I just want to put in again to say, when we look at also this transformative agreement and the open access issues, we are also looking at our own publishing houses, the small University publishing houses that we have.
How do we actually support them? And I can say in my institution we have the vets press. And for the first time. I've been there now for 10 months, I've made the point that we work hand in glove, the library and the University Press. One body so that we can also acquire their collections and they are open access collections and I'm also supporting them in paying for other things which have done they could not because of this plethora of us knowing that if you're not a big publisher, you're just there.
But we are also promoting values, and so forth. So it's important that that's why I highlighted our issues that we came up as some like as a consortium to say these are our non-negotiables because we also want to address our smaller. Yeah Yeah. Thanks, Kelly. Like your context.
This is I think described it as the Read More so than the public. How do you how do you think about transformative agreements? Are they. I mean, how relevant are they to your model. Yeah, it depends on the publisher. I mean we so some of the transformative agreements for the two publisher agreements that were in with our consortia.
Some of them have a limited number of APC tokens, if you will, and we're allotted the amount based on what we've published with that publisher in the last few years, and we keep right on par with that. So for me, it's a benefit that all these large universities that were part of our consortium are heavy publishers because then they have a lot of pull into getting these agreements. We do not at the library fund, fund any author's publishing other than entering into these read and publish agreements and providing them the access to these APC free publishing in the journals that we have the transformative agreements with.
But the college itself has a grants department that the faculty can work with. And I know that there's a lot of. Journals that have very high ABCs that our faculty just publish with. So they try to find others, or they will email me and say, hey, I want to publish this article. Can you give me a list of what we have agreements with in our read and publish?
So they are actively trying to find ways to make their stuff open. But we at the library don't support them financially in that respect. Thank you. And then there's another question here. But I wonder if it's been answered. I think an anonymous attendee suggests that right collecting is limited by producers.
Aggregators can be gatekeepers, but these are also limited by what is offered to them for their platforms. Who are the primary gatekeepers here? Publishers, University economics. In the us, it seems that the diverse voices means writing about those voices, not letting those voices speak for themselves. So this goes back to a lot of what we talked about, like representation from all corners, right?
So then that makes me think of it about forcing things versus not forcing things. And the question around whether mandates, memos towards openness, affect how on which disciplines and for which authors institutions spend their budgets. How do how do mandates affect how you go about collections development?
And in the back of my mind, I'm thinking a force that maybe, maybe mandates, I feel, have a tendency to amplify access. Two voices that are already pretty well funded, right? Rather than like really like rethinking how this works a bit along the lines of what Daisy was talking about. Anyone want to say something?
Robin? anonymous attendee. The question you started with. You are right on target. There are way too many gatekeepers and Daisy has mentioned this before. But I want to emphasize that one of the big. Gatekeeping gatekeepers are.
The reward system for the researchers themselves. Neil, you just talked about how you know, mandates from funders. Elevate those people who have been in the habit of getting grants and the Matthew effect and I have more citations. I have more grants. So and now I'm on the board and my post-doc is on this group. So I'm connected and I'm in the system.
And we need to break the system in some fashion and to let indigenous cultures way of knowing and sharing information in and local. You know I'm in the middle of the Midwest and climate changes is goofing up agriculture and the USDA has cut agriculture funding. So I don't know what we're going to do. I guess I won't eat eggs anymore. But the promotion and tenure system, the high impact journals, I don't.
Something something needs to be done about that whole system. I mean, in the Uc there's this Helios group that's a. Break off of spark and the National Academies of science, medicine and engineering that is looking you know, you have to get the president of the University to sign off on this. So that they and the faculty will actually sit down. Because the librarians have been talking about, well, if you continue to publish in these expensive high impact journals, I can't buy books anymore.
And that hasn't worked. So now they're trying to have these conversations about. Because consciousness has been changed. We're more aware of the inequity of those reward systems. And so I think. Lots of things have to change. And there's lots of all these gatekeepers that. Keep people out that we really want and really need to have in this conversation to build a more open and equitable and inclusive system that might save our gosh darn lives.
I didn't swear. I said, gosh darn. So so. So so maybe this. Tangentially covers, or at least one of the other questions. How can research for life be used all sorts of provide greater support for authors in the global South. And I mean, I guess maybe that's one for you, daisuke, but that also, I think, brings it a bit back to what?
Whose voices are being represented in that content. Like is he to say, oh, he'll use all our consent? But you mentioned days before that a lot of that content is very euro or Western centric, but. Yeah and any thoughts about that question? Yes I used to research for life as one example in addressing what we are trying to do that came forward. However, there are other publishers who can actually directly get involved by the issue.
Like I highlighted, it's those aggregators. That I would like to make as indicators geography, geographical location, language, their culture. How do you respect? Social justice. It comes to respect. Remember if you don't respect what's written by a person based in a.
About gorillas. Let's take examples about gorillas. You know, one of the countries that deals with guerrillas, and then that's where you find them and they're becoming extinct. But a national who's writing about that we are publication is not considered, but someone comes from the North or the West and they write about the same research.
They were assisted by the same researcher. They would get published without a wink of an eye. OK so and that also links to the value chain. There's a lot that needs to be done. And I'm grateful that the next time when we talk, Neil will have more to put on the table. We will be having a seminar this year to address these issues that we highlighted under social justice, including Latin America.
We want to bring Latin America to the fore. We want to bring all the other countries in Africa to the fore so that we all address our issues as equals and so forth. And it's quite important that we're going forward, because what's here is also linked, again, to the transformative agreement. The more you publish, the more you get pointers. To go on. What about the other institutions that are not research intensive?
Because of their geographical location, because of the mentorship programs that, you know, there's a lot at stake here. Yeah our stop her there or else I'm talking to. Yeah so. So so then there's. There's another question here. If we take maybe this is like taking a different view on things and what sort of educational resources are valued by researchers other than original research articles that would warrant subscription to the journal publisher and maybe Kelly, if you want to kick off on this one.
Sure before Kelly before Kelly comes in, they're interesting for the anonymous not to be anonymous because they are quite active so that we know whom we are dealing with, whom we are dealing with, because if you hide, then you make me also hide what I want to say. I just I'm just raising it. It's OK. It's a safe space.
It's just, you know, if we talk about openness, why hide behind the paywall, you know? Yeah so the first thing that comes to my mind is something that was addressed at the Charleston conference this past year, this past November. And that is videos that are connected with the research that's being done and written about in these journal articles is a really important thing.
And our campus videos, videos in general, streaming video is very important. But I would say from like, like just for instance, scientific journals having videos that would allow a student to see what's going on, what's being described in the articles are really a great advantage for us to warrant subscription to the journal public service.
I'll jump in. And I want to the first thing I want to say is. You don't really have to. In my point of view, from what ASU is doing, we are more than willing with the long tail of medium to small publishers. You don't need to go to transformative or create a whole lot of other content your small medium size to begin with.
You have a focus already that's served you pretty well for however many years. Think about subscribe to open. Think about diamond. It may be work, but we are more than willing to spend money on Subscribe to open because then that means you can continue your own diversity and inclusion efforts and know that you have the money to go through peer review, publish good articles in your discipline, and make sure that people not tethered to an institution or from a different geographic area from a smaller school or they don't have funding.
I mean. I think subscribe to open and diamond journals. I mean, publishing costs money. We are more than willing to continue to support it through subscriptions. The only thing we're asking now, especially more of the bigger and more commercial like publishers, is especially for the transformative agreements. We don't want them to take the number of articles we publish divided by our revenue is what you need to pay for an APC.
If we're going to pay for publishing, I want to pay for publishing plus whatever you need for innovation and inflation and new servers and things like that. I don't want to pay your shareholders all that much. So there's one of my biases right there. I'll just lay it right there where we're willing to support publishing, and that includes some sort of revenue and profit for whatever you need to continue to publish or be a good society.
So we're asking those questions now, and it's really hard to get those answers. We understand that. So if you can't answer it, that's fine. But still come and talk to me. We we do a lot of diamond, a lot of as well some as studio. But as far as other educational resources we do a lot of we are producing and using a lot of open educational textbooks. We do a lot of streaming video, that's all paywalled.
I don't know if that's ever going to be open. My brain hurts when I think about streaming video documentaries and things like that. But I honestly don't, you know, if you add more content to charge more money. I'm going to I'm going to really think hard about because I have a limited budget that's already spread very thin thinly then. You know, if you're adding content just to keep a subscription.
Maybe I don't need the subscription. And how about you, daisy? What sort of educational resources are valued by your researchers? Yeah, we are all on the same wavelength as librarians in practice that we have all the tools. You know, like it was indicated now about our Erps. And then we all have our lab guides, and that's what academics want.
And we saw with the two years of the pandemic, how innovative we all became to ensure that we can produce and be innovative from the IP side. But when it comes to what would make us continue with going for subscriptions for us in the south, it's more about. There's a little level of there has to be a level of differentiation. And I've alluded to the issues around social justice.
And that's our standpoint that in a country where our GDPR is a second level, we are like in South Africa. But when you look at other countries in Africa, they are not the same. We are the breadbasket of Africa like it used to be Zimbabwe. Now it's South Africa. But we don't want to be what we call it now, as we are called up in other parts of Africa. We don't want to be like the big brother.
We want everybody to have access. And that's why whatever we do nationally, we include our counterparts and our peers across the continent. So that we level the playing fields. For us, it's important for publishers. Look at countries, regions differently. The dollar is not the same as the Rand. The pound is not the same as the rain. And that's a concern for us that we are being charged the same irrespective and also looking at smaller institutions.
And the other challenge is how do we then address our community libraries, our public libraries in Africa who don't have these resources that we have in academic life? Because most students learn us. Didn't learn to learn about they tend to learn about these things when they come now to an academic library. Because of the resource's availability and the finding of our community libraries and so forth.
So our public and community libraries will not be the same like what we see in the Uc or like we see in Scandinavian countries because of this issue. So it's a, you know, we need that reconstruction and deconstruction from the publishing side. Yeah Thanks a lot. Hey, Thanks. So we have a 2 minutes left.
So I was thinking sort of a quick round Robin here, maybe asking like just 30 seconds or something like that. From your point of view, what endpoint are we trying to get to? Like if you had a magic button to change things, what's the primary thing that you'd want to do? What's the what's the endpoint with this? Anyone who wants to go first. I want to say for me, it will be when we talk about open.
It must be really open. Open is costing lots of money. So open must be really open. Thank you. Thank you. Margaret's point. Also, I would say broadly expanded voices with a number of different areas from a number of different areas around the world in a sustainable model.
Robert ditto, ditto. And I would like to say that what we need to do is also understand that. It is going to take money. It's going to take a good bit of money. And if we want to build this networked, linked, inclusive, open system. More than the libraries need to pay for it.
Yeah OK. Well, Thank you all. I think that wraps it up for today. So I want to say Thank you so much to Daisy Kelley, robin, SP David and Melanie, our sponsors and to everyone who joined today and who asked questions. I hope you all have a great morning, afternoon and evening and check in again in the future for other future events from cesp.
Thank you. Thank you very much. And our next event will be on June 27, June RA21 to the next ask the experts webinar on early career researchers and check out the other upcoming events from cesp. This discussion was recorded and everyone will receive a link when it's posted on the cesp website. And Thank you again to all of our 2023 education sponsors.
This concludes today's webinar and Thanks, everybody, for attending. Thank you.
Segment:0 .
Welcome to today's Ask the experts panel. We are pleased you can join our discussion on library collections development. I'm David Meyers, special education committee member and a lead publisher at Wolters kluwer. Before we begin, I want to thank our 2023 education sponsors, Mary Kay silver chair, 67 bricks and Taylor Francis f 1,000.
We are grateful for their support. A few housekeeping items. Phones have been muted, so please use the Q&A panel to enter questions for the panelists. Our agenda is to cover whatever questions you have, so don't be shy about asking. This one hour session will be recorded and available following today's broadcast. A quick note on SSPS code of conduct.
In today's meeting. We are committed to equity, diversity and providing an inclusive meeting environment, fostering open dialogue, free of harassment, discrimination and hostile conduct. We ask all participants whether speaking or in chat to consider and debate relevant viewpoints in an orderly, respectful and fair manner.
It is now my pleasure to introduce today's moderator, Neil Christiansen meles, the head of public relations for knowledge unlatch and o'boyle. He has a 20 plus year career in scholarly publishing and information services, holding a range of prior roles in partnerships, business development, sales and editorial for Scholarly Publishing and technology organizations, including monks, guard, Blackwell nature publishing group, Wiley University of California Press and solo cactus Research Square company and as a consultant.
His core areas of interest are B2B partnerships with publishers and universities, AI and software, enterprise sales and open access services. In his current role, he focuses on the publisher relationships related to obo, the open access management solution for institutions and knowledge unlatched open access crowdfunding, the brokering of support between institutions and publishers. And now over to email.
Oh, Thank you, David, and Thank you, everyone for joining us here today. We have the pleasure of being joined by Daisy Kelley and Robin to ask about collections development in an open world. And I'll ask the three of you to introduce yourselves in a minute. But first, to set the scene for people joining. This is an ask the expert session.
So ideally, we would like for it to be driven by the questions from people in the Q&A feature that you will see at the bottom of your screen. I think this is a fantastic opportunity to ask all sorts of questions about how openness or open access, if you will, affects and is affected by how libraries acquire and support scholarly content. So let's kick it off with asking Daisy, Kelley and Robin to briefly introduce yourselves while people start typing up questions.
And maybe we can start with you, Daisy. Good evening from South Africa. It's Daisy Marcella. And I'm the University librarian at the University of the witwatersrand, which is based in Johannesburg. And my University is one of the top research intensive University in South Africa and one of the universities that looking at rankings and it's amongst the top ranking visitors in the world.
I work as the University librarian at the University. And my previous involvement has been also in University library management. I was previously at the University of South Africa, which is the largest, biggest distance learning University in Africa with over 370,000 students. But the library was the biggest in Africa and the biggest academic lab in Africa, and we always compared it with the Alexandria library.
So when we talk about collection development, it's quite a call to how do we actually address all these issues, especially when you are looking at distance learning and students who are coming from all over the world and with your oldest student being a graduate, graduating at the age of 90 years. And I would just want to give the context that the University of South Africa, including where I am now, the University of the witwatersrand, that's where Nelson Mandela studied and with my role at the University of South Africa, also as part of collection development there in the archives, we also had the letters from Nelson Mandela and the assignments because he was incarcerated, as we all know, in South Africa is the only country where when you are in jail, you are allowed to study.
And he's one of those politicians and some of our incarcerated students, they study through our University and they qualify and they graduate. And we I pride myself from Africa saying that we were lucky that we went through apartheid. And this also links to access when we talk about now collections, openness, open communities, because now we are able to make those collections available for people to see Nelson Mandela's writings as a student, his assignments that were, you know, put away that nobody's supposed to see this and that.
So for today's session, I'm looking forward to discussing and hearing the comments also from how we live in a global society. And I will also share my perspective on collective development from the global South. And I serve on a number of international bodies, especially the international science council, where we look at open data and open science. And I've been in this body for the past 16 years.
Thank you, colleagues. Hey Thank you so much, Stacey. Kelly, you want to go next? Sir hi, I'm Kelly densa. I'm from Davidson College in North Carolina. We're just North of Charlotte. I'm at Davidson College is a small liberal arts college that supports around 2000 students.
We're all undergraduates and around 220 faculty members. I've been here for five years overseeing the tech aspects of electronic resources and discovery systems, but also managing the acquisitions and budget as it relates to resources and open initiatives. I'm excited to be here today. I feel a bit like a small fish in a big pond. Are publishing activity at Davidson puts us in the red category of free to publish agreements.
We participate in our states consortium and rely on the uncw universities publishing power for ABC based deals that are negotiated on behalf of the consortium. We're committed to supporting collections and publishing at the college and in the library through sustainable, equitable models, and I look forward to today's discussion. Thank you very much, Kelly and Robin.
Hello I'm Robinson. I currently work at the Iowa State University library in the middle of the United the continental United States. I've been here for about 18 months. Previously, I was a science librarian and then turned into a scholarly communications librarian.
And now I'm the director of collections and open strategies, a job which melds my scholarly communication open access, open science knowledge with learning how to manage a collection quickly. So force Fed. So I'm really interested in this conversation because openness impacts collections and all the d-ii and equitably, equitably discussions impact all of that. So this will be a really interesting conversation, especially with publishers here.
Well, Thank you all. There are no questions yet in the Q&A field. So, of course, we come prepared. We have some questions prepared, but please don't be shy. But let me kick off with a first one here and. The decisions to support the voices of some authors and disciplines over others are everyday challenges in collections development.
How do libraries decide what content to acquire and support, or who voices whose voices to support in an open world? And maybe we can start with you, Robin. OK so. Libraries, put together policies, guidelines and processes for pulling information in. We started with having to have only tangible materials, and that's broadened to pulling in online and streaming and.
Microfilm and manuscript collections. The whole nine yards. Most libraries first priority will be the local needs of their local community for whom they whom serve. We get our money as an academic library from the University. Universities, research and learning needs are the priority.
Iowa State is a public University. So then after that, because we're funded by the state, it becomes, what do the citizens of Iowa need? And then, of course, open. So the whole open scholarship has Fed right into that great open society need. So we want to support content open or close that supports what happens on our campus and then what happens in Iowa.
We want to make our research openly available in return. So that people can use it across the globe. We want to support open infrastructure that aligns with our values, and we also want to represent marginalized communities and our collections. So that means we have to keep revisiting whatever policies we create to update them as things change in this ever changing world.
Thank you. Kelly Daisy, we have thoughts on this. Yes from my side. I think I do understand what Robin highlighted. From our side, we are looking at the infrastructure issues. Other than infrastructure issues. When you look also at the skills and the competencies that you have with the understanding of the narrative around open, open science and open access and how it links to your collection and the adoption of any mandate that comes forward and who's championing that mandate?
Remember, as librarians, when we come up, if we take, for example, the issues around repositories. We started with that and we had to run with it when we look at data. We are not the producers of data, but we need to make sure that we collate, we make sure that it's available. It's available, and that impacts on our standing within our institutions, whether it's a public library, a community library or an academic library.
But when we look at academic libraries, it's quite critical the understanding of why we do certain things in collection, development and collection management. For me, there's a difference between collection development and collection management, and it's quite key for us to understand that. And that also enforces our policies. And what I've picked up is that the.
As information professionals, we tend to stagnate when it comes to policies and we don't want to move out because things have been done like this. This is the policy and this is how we are going to acquire without looking at the needs of the users. Academic libraries per se. I from the global South.
We have to be blamed because we listen to what the course content is all about from that, from the researcher, for example. I want this. And we saw that with COVID. The past two years of COVID actually showed us that because then the publishers came to the fore and said, these are the open source access publications that are databases that you can access for free and libraries make them available.
And we had to run like headless chickens to make sure that. However, when it comes to the budgeting internally, we budget to say we need so much for resources, whether it's e tools, e databases and hard copies and so forth. Then you have the gatekeepers where you have your own researchers who want the collections, but they are saying no, but why is the library getting more money?
And that's why we see also the cuts in our budget. Because the life begets money to ensure that we have adequate resources. And when you go to the table. To fight for funding. Then the issues come. Oh, the dinner recess. Why do you have so much funding for the library? But they are forgetting about the costs.
And that's also the issue of the publishers come into play. Because we have the publisher at stake, we have the academic at stake or the researcher in the library here, and the budget goes to the library. The researcher determines what needs to be in the. The publishers, they do have license agreements and we are also impacted by the cost of the rent dollar euro exchange that we have to deal with. And it puts us in the middle.
Because when you as part of your policy changes, you say, remember, how do we address? I saw a question around language. You know any connections in the chatted about language how as librarians when we need to come forward and say we need to look at the content that we put on our shelves or that we have electronically. The issue is, who are you? Because I'm the faculty, dean, and I decide what needs to be there and that needs to change.
And that's what we are trying to drive to ensure that our collections encapsulates what our users require. Yes I go to three years ago, I made a presentation where I was talking about the genre of collections that we have in South Africa and in particular one particular library, which is a University library which appeals collections.
However, we had more eurocentric collections and when you look at the population, for example, in South Africa. The dynamics and the population, Black versus white population is different, but we still have the collections that were collected in the apartheid days and the collection that needs to be on the shelves are not there. And then we have the gatekeepers.
So I just wanted to highlight that. And if most of you don't know, I would rise or rise indicate that in 2018, South African higher education, all the universities had an uprising in 2018 that changed the landscape of how we collect. How do we have a collection development and collection management? The students went out there and fought for decolonizing. Universities, decolonizing curricula.
And us as librarians, as knowledge practitioners, we have to come to the table and say, what do they actually mean? If a student comes to your library and says, but I'm looking for a book on Chinua achebe, or a book about four South Africans by a South African Writer. And you don't have it. But I find a book about, you know, the history of how Cape town, how the Cape of Good hope, which is now Cape Town.
And we have that. How do we deal with it? So I just wanted to highlight and this also impacts on our public libraries because also how do we populate with the languages that are spoken? For what you would call minority communities. The indigenous communities. How do we connect that? I just wanted to touch base on that.
So it gets impacted by the infrastructure, the budget's part. From the publishing side. Also, there is a linkage. And also from the research site and the researchers. Yeah Thank you. Hey, Thank you, Daisy. So that sort of triggers questions around like representation and underrepresented communities.
And there is a question here. Access may be limited by internet access and primary language, which is what is done to be more inclusive and on this inclusiveness. Like how do we think about. Like the voices of early career researchers, contingent faculty, independent researchers, unaffiliated scholars who in the way that a lot of open access is done today, may find no or very limited possibility for institutional support in open access.
And so maybe marrying that with that question about what is done to be more inclusive. Kelly, is there something you want you have in mind for that question? Sure I can add a little bit. I agree with everything that was said earlier about collection development because I was as much the same way. We're actually a faculty driven collection.
So our kind of official papers of the college mandate that the faculty are the ones that drive our collections. So we base what we purchase or give access to on what the courses that are being taught for each semester. So luckily we have a diverse faculty pool, we have diverse student pool that are looking for research topics that are quite diverse. So we are able to provide a good selection of that.
One of the things that's backing us up, however, is that because it's faculty driven, we're hesitant to get rid of things. So we have a second floor that's filled with Dewey classified books that haven't checked out in 20 years. And we're about to embark on a new student or a new library. So for us, it's a lot of, OK, we need to get rid of this print, especially this older print that's not being used anymore, get it online, get online access to it.
So we partner with a lot of consortium and different organizations that bring shared collections together. That's really important for us, especially as a small library. And that also, I think, helps bring some inclusivity into what we're able to provide to our researchers, just inherently in that. And then as far as the question about junior faculty or faculty that might not be as funded early career, we are really eager to support them, especially in the humanities.
We're basically a we're a heavy humanities school, but we also have science programs. But it's our humanities faculty that have the biggest problem, I think, with funding. And so we partner with lever press, which is AI think it's an OH monograph press to help our authors give them some sort of kind of pathway towards publishing a monograph. And then as I mentioned, our ABC deals and those types of things that we rely on through our consortiums.
Thank Thank you. Kelly and robin, we chatted very briefly a bit about this just before the call started. Right like this. The support system or network for researchers who sort of sit outside or in between institutions or younger or contingent. And what are your thoughts about like representing the voices of these early career researchers when they don't necessarily have access to funding, or they may be disciplines in the humanities where, you know, there isn't much grant funding that will support any type of apks or pieces.
Right well. It's kind of. We're talking two sides of a. A point. I mean, the people that don't have a home institution that has a library need access to paywalled content. They can. And if they have an internet connection. They can get to the open content, which may or may not be enough or in the areas that they want.
So just trying to make more and more content openly available through subscribe to open through things like lever press or fun to mission for books or things like that will make more and more information hopefully as time progresses freely available for internet capable, non institutionally related people. When you think about making sure underrepresented voices in whatever geographic area you're talking about have the ability to publish.
That's a slightly different. Conversation that's where the whole current APC, the current idea of an APC model. Ties an author to an institution to have funding, whereas things like subscribe to open or like fund admission or things like that or diamond journals. Allow a. An untethered researcher to publish without having to pay the APC.
So we're trying. We don't have much money, but we're trying to spread it thinly, but across all of those ways to try to hit all of those communities. It's hard, but we're trying. OK from my side, if I can add, from the global South perspective. With regards to the collection development question that you ask about the early researchers and family clarity regarding the institutional support for.
OK I think for us it has been important with regards to the adoption of open access policies within our institutions. And we were lucky in South Africa that the government itself was pushing for this through the Ministry of Science and Technology for the past 10 years. And I can say now it's going through our parliament legislature.
In December we had an international science meeting, international science meeting held in Cape town, where government was finalizing with all African leaders, including some European countries, with, for example, the Dutch funding agency, the German funding agency. We also had the NSSF you are familiar with the NSSF and it was driven by also my former employer institution, the National Science Foundation of South Africa, which is an ambit of the Ministry.
And we have now an open, open science. Policy for the country. And they were trying to make it inclusive. And we've been involved in that to a. Address Africa, not just South Africa, because we noticed that our researchers. Permeable we have researchers coming from Nigeria, Kenya to South Africa, and also the funding agency also supports collaboration and partnerships when they publish.
So I just want to highlight that for us, that's good traction. And the fact that we have a consortium of University provosts or what do you call them, presidents that also supports our consortium of librarians where I'm currently the chair. When we talk about the issues I saw about transformative agreements, issues around open data, open science, open access, including open innovation, and now we're talking about transformative agreements.
And I must just highlight to you that when it came to transformative agreements for the 2023 cycle negotiations that we were busy with in 2022, we made breakthroughs for Southern Africa. With publishers globally. I won't mention some names, but you know, some of them where we put our foot down on what we want on our terms from the global South. A typical example is that you can't buy.
Folks back in. You remember the 1966 folks folks work and those beautiful wines, Neal and expected to be driven the same way in the potholes in Africa like it's driven in Germany. And that's what the publishers are doing with us. And I they are. Publishers are, but I have to be frank, that's our analogy. So to drive that forward, what we did as the consortium, the South African library consortium, we then came up.
With principles that we are negotiating on. And we drafted those principles. They were approved. We sent them to our University provost consortium. They were approved and supported that. We are standing firm. We are supported by high levels of all of our universities when it comes to the issues around what we are talking about access now and how it's going to address issues of equity.
And I just want to highlight that as part of our issues around how we dealt with these issues, around transformative agreements, on how do we look. For course, there's a question there that I think we can address it now that we looked at our what we call social justice principles. For South Africa, South Africa that are non-negotiable. And here we are looking at promoting accessibility to local research, which is crucial for accumulating and developing a corpus of local knowledge for growth and development of African society and the true ambit of what we are looking at here.
We are looking at that. Publishers must have an equity and inclusion plan that will address challenges of researchers in the global South. A typical example of our publishers, they publish on local issues. Malaria now we talk about climate change. We have a lot of bees in the southern part of South Africa that migrate.
And we have research, as I used to when I was at the National spending agency, I came to Noah in Washington because of data management activities that I was involved in. Who comes to South Africa and collect the data? The data goes there on bees, but the bees are migrating South Africa. So we're looking at the issues around when we say what publishers must be doing, when we look at social justice with a.
Researchers and authors. You need to. When we publish the rejection rate that we receive from Africa, it goes back again to the issue of language. And it's not that we don't write. We know how to write English. We write the queen's language. We don't write American language.
I just want to make it clear we write pure English. But the rejection rate, because the content is not what the publisher wants. We are addressing social issues that are in the SDGS. And that's where we are. When we talk about social justice, we are looking holistically at all these things. Also, the review process. How do you come in as publishers and mentor?
Review us. How do you come in as publishers and come up with developmental programs? That's what we are spending on currently in South Africa and it's a non-negotiable. When we look again at the issues of social justice, we actually want the deconstruction of structures that perpetuates inequality, exclusion and marginalization.
Secondly, we want from the publishing side to look at reconstruction of the structures that advances equity. And I think that clarifies that we are all contributing to this global. Scholarship process. However, how do we address the inequalities? There was a comment about internet access. It's a challenge.
I'm involved in a project with Qatar through my university, where we have other universities up in Africa that are working with us. And now in February months we'll be having a workshop to address 400 students who are working through my University who are from other African countries because they don't have resources. And that's where that issue around collaboration, which resources you make available and so forth.
And Carter, we are using that as a tool to ensure that institutions, for example, or bodies like research for life actually assist those other for access. And I can talk more about all these issues, but I just want to highlight that it's quite important that for us, when you talk about scholarly communication environment, it addresses all the different biases geography, language, peer reviews, everything.
I just wanted to highlight that and we transformative agreements. We don't want to take up as it is, but we want it to address our needs. And so forth. Yeah Thank you. Yeah, Thank you, Daisy. Yeah, for sure. There are some like some deep rooted issues around representation.
And I think we'll come back to them in a second. I just I see there's some questions here and maybe we'll just get through some of them. And one here says, in a world with increasing open access science, what are your priorities for maintaining, prioritizing scientific journal subscriptions? I think with days, right, you're like, well, there's a perpetuation of some unequal balances. And Kelly Robin so that question.
I can tackle it first. So to be honest, we don't have anything. Written out right now. We have a new ad for collections that starting in February, we have a new collections committee structure that's going to be here at the library. And these are all things that I've been kind of having to deal with on my own and now is going to be brought to a larger group.
So that it's not all put on me or me or that me and the director. Like I said, a lot of what we do has to do with what the faculty want, what the faculty want access to for their research, and what the faculty want access to as far as students. So that's a huge. Think for us, but also knowing that scientific journal subscriptions are really expensive and any way we can knock down some of those expenses, we will do it.
I think. So we or the Iowa State University of science and technology. We have to keep adding that into our licenses. Everyone wants to cut it off. So we are we have a big engineering school. We have agriculture, veterinary medicine. So we are very focused on science.
We're into experimentation and supporting experimentation here. What we want to do, given all the changes in the last 4 to five years and what may happen in the future is. We're not tied. To continuing to support. Any particular set of scientific journals.
Unless they directly support the research and the learning that goes on here. What we want to do is support open scholarship. And if that means taking and we've already done this, taking money away from subscription journals to shift it to. Subscribe to open agreements, diamond journals. We have 20 transformative or read and publish agreements for trying different models of read and publish.
We're in a couple of different conversations where we're leaving poor publishers going, really? You really, really want to do it that way? We're like, yeah, we really, really want to do it that way. So and we're also at the point where now with in physics and some of the other sciences that have a high uptake of open, we're starting to see we're reaching that tipping point which I know scares publishers have to death enough of the content is open we can fill in the rest with it in our library alone, in our back files.
We're starting to cancel those subscriptions. And so. That's why my job title is director of collections and open strategies. This is going to be a bumpy ride, and we're going to try to be as kind to everybody as we can. But what we want to do is make sure that open scholarship, the whole nine yards, whether it's preprint servers, we support several preprint servers.
We Subpart F 1,000. We want to make the infrastructure, the data, the metadata, everything open, vetted, linked up. So we're trying to figure out what this next iteration of the ecosystem is going to look like. And I know none of us know what it's going to look like, but we're trying.
Yeah, that makes you think a bit about also what Daisy said before we touched on transformative agreements. And now there's a question here from Judy Luther, who says funding. To what extent is your library interested involved in transformative agreements? Are there funds provided by the library to underwrite open access fees for authors whose research is not funded?
And I have like and an additional context to that I also wonder about. Right and that's. And when we talk about transformative agreements Daisy was mentioning before, right, with maybe some very big players. But but what are we doing with the 100 or the thousands of publishers who are too small to go into transformative agreements with institutions or consortia where they say, we're not interested, we don't have enough sort of affinity with each other.
Right? but if you look at their impact cumulatively, there is a very long tail of research that is sitting with smaller publishers to sort fall under a threshold of critical mass. So I know that's a lot to pack in, but maybe we could start sort of with Judy's question. Right are there funds provided by the library to underwrite underwrite open access fees for authors whose research is not funded?
Daisy how do you go about that? But from our side in South Africa, we don't find all our universities from the library side, we don't budget for apcs. The APC are budgeted buy from the faculty side with the research office. So there is a pot of money that funded budgeted for APC. And then in my current institution now I was surprised when I got there that the library has to administer apcs and article processing charges.
And I said, but who does that in South and in South africa? We don't do that. Why are you doing that? You know, a librarian who's qualified must be now doing administrative work of counting center and rents. And it's not, you know, so I'm winning that out based on the argument I put forward. But we don't budget.
The budget comes through and it comes into our information resources budget. It's there and we report on. How it's going out. But I don't budget for that. Yeah, but the other caveat for us is that in South Africa, with the host democracy coming from apartheid, there's a lot of good that was done by the Nelson Mandela government when he came into power to address the inequality in education.
Was that any researcher or any person who publishes affiliated to an academic institution? They publish, and we have the Ministry of Higher Education. There's a policy also there. They get what you call a rebate when you publish. You get money. An article that you publish, you get money that goes into your faculty and you can decide how to use that money to get more students on board to pay for scholarships or to buy equipment for students or for yourself, for your own research.
And that has been a carrot and stick to ensure that they publish. But now the issue has been why then are you addressing that? It must just be high impact factor journals. And it comes back to those small publishers. How do we address the small publishers? If now the Ministry of Higher Education says it must be in high impact journals. So I just want to put in again to say, when we look at also this transformative agreement and the open access issues, we are also looking at our own publishing houses, the small University publishing houses that we have.
How do we actually support them? And I can say in my institution we have the vets press. And for the first time. I've been there now for 10 months, I've made the point that we work hand in glove, the library and the University Press. One body so that we can also acquire their collections and they are open access collections and I'm also supporting them in paying for other things which have done they could not because of this plethora of us knowing that if you're not a big publisher, you're just there.
But we are also promoting values, and so forth. So it's important that that's why I highlighted our issues that we came up as some like as a consortium to say these are our non-negotiables because we also want to address our smaller. Yeah Yeah. Thanks, Kelly. Like your context.
This is I think described it as the Read More so than the public. How do you how do you think about transformative agreements? Are they. I mean, how relevant are they to your model. Yeah, it depends on the publisher. I mean we so some of the transformative agreements for the two publisher agreements that were in with our consortia.
Some of them have a limited number of APC tokens, if you will, and we're allotted the amount based on what we've published with that publisher in the last few years, and we keep right on par with that. So for me, it's a benefit that all these large universities that were part of our consortium are heavy publishers because then they have a lot of pull into getting these agreements. We do not at the library fund, fund any author's publishing other than entering into these read and publish agreements and providing them the access to these APC free publishing in the journals that we have the transformative agreements with.
But the college itself has a grants department that the faculty can work with. And I know that there's a lot of. Journals that have very high ABCs that our faculty just publish with. So they try to find others, or they will email me and say, hey, I want to publish this article. Can you give me a list of what we have agreements with in our read and publish?
So they are actively trying to find ways to make their stuff open. But we at the library don't support them financially in that respect. Thank you. And then there's another question here. But I wonder if it's been answered. I think an anonymous attendee suggests that right collecting is limited by producers.
Aggregators can be gatekeepers, but these are also limited by what is offered to them for their platforms. Who are the primary gatekeepers here? Publishers, University economics. In the us, it seems that the diverse voices means writing about those voices, not letting those voices speak for themselves. So this goes back to a lot of what we talked about, like representation from all corners, right?
So then that makes me think of it about forcing things versus not forcing things. And the question around whether mandates, memos towards openness, affect how on which disciplines and for which authors institutions spend their budgets. How do how do mandates affect how you go about collections development?
And in the back of my mind, I'm thinking a force that maybe, maybe mandates, I feel, have a tendency to amplify access. Two voices that are already pretty well funded, right? Rather than like really like rethinking how this works a bit along the lines of what Daisy was talking about. Anyone want to say something?
Robin? anonymous attendee. The question you started with. You are right on target. There are way too many gatekeepers and Daisy has mentioned this before. But I want to emphasize that one of the big. Gatekeeping gatekeepers are.
The reward system for the researchers themselves. Neil, you just talked about how you know, mandates from funders. Elevate those people who have been in the habit of getting grants and the Matthew effect and I have more citations. I have more grants. So and now I'm on the board and my post-doc is on this group. So I'm connected and I'm in the system.
And we need to break the system in some fashion and to let indigenous cultures way of knowing and sharing information in and local. You know I'm in the middle of the Midwest and climate changes is goofing up agriculture and the USDA has cut agriculture funding. So I don't know what we're going to do. I guess I won't eat eggs anymore. But the promotion and tenure system, the high impact journals, I don't.
Something something needs to be done about that whole system. I mean, in the Uc there's this Helios group that's a. Break off of spark and the National Academies of science, medicine and engineering that is looking you know, you have to get the president of the University to sign off on this. So that they and the faculty will actually sit down. Because the librarians have been talking about, well, if you continue to publish in these expensive high impact journals, I can't buy books anymore.
And that hasn't worked. So now they're trying to have these conversations about. Because consciousness has been changed. We're more aware of the inequity of those reward systems. And so I think. Lots of things have to change. And there's lots of all these gatekeepers that. Keep people out that we really want and really need to have in this conversation to build a more open and equitable and inclusive system that might save our gosh darn lives.
I didn't swear. I said, gosh darn. So so. So so maybe this. Tangentially covers, or at least one of the other questions. How can research for life be used all sorts of provide greater support for authors in the global South. And I mean, I guess maybe that's one for you, daisuke, but that also, I think, brings it a bit back to what?
Whose voices are being represented in that content. Like is he to say, oh, he'll use all our consent? But you mentioned days before that a lot of that content is very euro or Western centric, but. Yeah and any thoughts about that question? Yes I used to research for life as one example in addressing what we are trying to do that came forward. However, there are other publishers who can actually directly get involved by the issue.
Like I highlighted, it's those aggregators. That I would like to make as indicators geography, geographical location, language, their culture. How do you respect? Social justice. It comes to respect. Remember if you don't respect what's written by a person based in a.
About gorillas. Let's take examples about gorillas. You know, one of the countries that deals with guerrillas, and then that's where you find them and they're becoming extinct. But a national who's writing about that we are publication is not considered, but someone comes from the North or the West and they write about the same research.
They were assisted by the same researcher. They would get published without a wink of an eye. OK so and that also links to the value chain. There's a lot that needs to be done. And I'm grateful that the next time when we talk, Neil will have more to put on the table. We will be having a seminar this year to address these issues that we highlighted under social justice, including Latin America.
We want to bring Latin America to the fore. We want to bring all the other countries in Africa to the fore so that we all address our issues as equals and so forth. And it's quite important that we're going forward, because what's here is also linked, again, to the transformative agreement. The more you publish, the more you get pointers. To go on. What about the other institutions that are not research intensive?
Because of their geographical location, because of the mentorship programs that, you know, there's a lot at stake here. Yeah our stop her there or else I'm talking to. Yeah so. So so then there's. There's another question here. If we take maybe this is like taking a different view on things and what sort of educational resources are valued by researchers other than original research articles that would warrant subscription to the journal publisher and maybe Kelly, if you want to kick off on this one.
Sure before Kelly before Kelly comes in, they're interesting for the anonymous not to be anonymous because they are quite active so that we know whom we are dealing with, whom we are dealing with, because if you hide, then you make me also hide what I want to say. I just I'm just raising it. It's OK. It's a safe space.
It's just, you know, if we talk about openness, why hide behind the paywall, you know? Yeah so the first thing that comes to my mind is something that was addressed at the Charleston conference this past year, this past November. And that is videos that are connected with the research that's being done and written about in these journal articles is a really important thing.
And our campus videos, videos in general, streaming video is very important. But I would say from like, like just for instance, scientific journals having videos that would allow a student to see what's going on, what's being described in the articles are really a great advantage for us to warrant subscription to the journal public service.
I'll jump in. And I want to the first thing I want to say is. You don't really have to. In my point of view, from what ASU is doing, we are more than willing with the long tail of medium to small publishers. You don't need to go to transformative or create a whole lot of other content your small medium size to begin with.
You have a focus already that's served you pretty well for however many years. Think about subscribe to open. Think about diamond. It may be work, but we are more than willing to spend money on Subscribe to open because then that means you can continue your own diversity and inclusion efforts and know that you have the money to go through peer review, publish good articles in your discipline, and make sure that people not tethered to an institution or from a different geographic area from a smaller school or they don't have funding.
I mean. I think subscribe to open and diamond journals. I mean, publishing costs money. We are more than willing to continue to support it through subscriptions. The only thing we're asking now, especially more of the bigger and more commercial like publishers, is especially for the transformative agreements. We don't want them to take the number of articles we publish divided by our revenue is what you need to pay for an APC.
If we're going to pay for publishing, I want to pay for publishing plus whatever you need for innovation and inflation and new servers and things like that. I don't want to pay your shareholders all that much. So there's one of my biases right there. I'll just lay it right there where we're willing to support publishing, and that includes some sort of revenue and profit for whatever you need to continue to publish or be a good society.
So we're asking those questions now, and it's really hard to get those answers. We understand that. So if you can't answer it, that's fine. But still come and talk to me. We we do a lot of diamond, a lot of as well some as studio. But as far as other educational resources we do a lot of we are producing and using a lot of open educational textbooks. We do a lot of streaming video, that's all paywalled.
I don't know if that's ever going to be open. My brain hurts when I think about streaming video documentaries and things like that. But I honestly don't, you know, if you add more content to charge more money. I'm going to I'm going to really think hard about because I have a limited budget that's already spread very thin thinly then. You know, if you're adding content just to keep a subscription.
Maybe I don't need the subscription. And how about you, daisy? What sort of educational resources are valued by your researchers? Yeah, we are all on the same wavelength as librarians in practice that we have all the tools. You know, like it was indicated now about our Erps. And then we all have our lab guides, and that's what academics want.
And we saw with the two years of the pandemic, how innovative we all became to ensure that we can produce and be innovative from the IP side. But when it comes to what would make us continue with going for subscriptions for us in the south, it's more about. There's a little level of there has to be a level of differentiation. And I've alluded to the issues around social justice.
And that's our standpoint that in a country where our GDPR is a second level, we are like in South Africa. But when you look at other countries in Africa, they are not the same. We are the breadbasket of Africa like it used to be Zimbabwe. Now it's South Africa. But we don't want to be what we call it now, as we are called up in other parts of Africa. We don't want to be like the big brother.
We want everybody to have access. And that's why whatever we do nationally, we include our counterparts and our peers across the continent. So that we level the playing fields. For us, it's important for publishers. Look at countries, regions differently. The dollar is not the same as the Rand. The pound is not the same as the rain. And that's a concern for us that we are being charged the same irrespective and also looking at smaller institutions.
And the other challenge is how do we then address our community libraries, our public libraries in Africa who don't have these resources that we have in academic life? Because most students learn us. Didn't learn to learn about they tend to learn about these things when they come now to an academic library. Because of the resource's availability and the finding of our community libraries and so forth.
So our public and community libraries will not be the same like what we see in the Uc or like we see in Scandinavian countries because of this issue. So it's a, you know, we need that reconstruction and deconstruction from the publishing side. Yeah Thanks a lot. Hey, Thanks. So we have a 2 minutes left.
So I was thinking sort of a quick round Robin here, maybe asking like just 30 seconds or something like that. From your point of view, what endpoint are we trying to get to? Like if you had a magic button to change things, what's the primary thing that you'd want to do? What's the what's the endpoint with this? Anyone who wants to go first. I want to say for me, it will be when we talk about open.
It must be really open. Open is costing lots of money. So open must be really open. Thank you. Thank you. Margaret's point. Also, I would say broadly expanded voices with a number of different areas from a number of different areas around the world in a sustainable model.
Robert ditto, ditto. And I would like to say that what we need to do is also understand that. It is going to take money. It's going to take a good bit of money. And if we want to build this networked, linked, inclusive, open system. More than the libraries need to pay for it.
Yeah OK. Well, Thank you all. I think that wraps it up for today. So I want to say Thank you so much to Daisy Kelley, robin, SP David and Melanie, our sponsors and to everyone who joined today and who asked questions. I hope you all have a great morning, afternoon and evening and check in again in the future for other future events from cesp.
Thank you. Thank you very much. And our next event will be on June 27, June RA21 to the next ask the experts webinar on early career researchers and check out the other upcoming events from cesp. This discussion was recorded and everyone will receive a link when it's posted on the cesp website. And Thank you again to all of our 2023 education sponsors.
This concludes today's webinar and Thanks, everybody, for attending. Thank you.
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