Library Committee Report on Principles for Emerging Systems of Scholarly Communication

The Library Committee endorses the general principles recommended by participants attending the meeting sponsored by the A.A.U., A.R.L and Merrill Advanced Studies Center at the University of Kansas in Tempe, Arizona, on March 2-4, 2000. Upon some discussion and deliberation of these principles the committee would like to explore ways to stimulate and facilitate faculty engagement with the issues raised. The stimulus for the recommendation of these principles is the current costs of scholarly publication (particularly in science, medicine and technology), which have become too costly for the academic community to sustain. A lack of consensus and concerted action by the academic community continues to allow escalation of prices and volume of print and on-line works. The nine principles that emerged from the conference are:

1. Recognize that the cost to the academic community of published research should be contained so that access to relevant research publications for faculty and students can be maintained and even expanded. Members of the academic community should collaborate to develop strategies that further this end. Faculty participation is essential to this end.

2. Electronic capabilities should be used, among other things to: provide wide access to scholarship, encourage interdisciplinary research, and enhance interoperability and searchability. Development of common standards will be particularly important in the electronic environment.

3. Scholarly publications must be archived in a secure manner so as to remain permanently available and, in the case of electronic works, a permanent identifier for citation and linking should be provided.

4. The system of scholarly publication must continue to include processes for evaluating the quality of scholarly work and every publication should provide the reader with information about the evaluation the work has undergone.

5. The academic community embraces the concepts of copyright and fair use and seeks a balance in the interests of owners and users in the digital environment. Universities, colleges, and especially their faculties should manage copyright and its limitations and exceptions in a manner that assures the faculty access to and use of their own published works in their research and teaching.

6. In negotiating publishing agreements, faculty should assign rights to their work in a manner that promotes the ready use of their work and choose journals that support the goal of making scholarly publications available at reasonable cost.

7. The time from submission to publication should be reduced in a manner consistent with the requirements of quality control.

8. To assure quality and reduce proliferation of publications, the evaluation of faculty should place a greater emphasis on quality of publications and a reduced emphasis on quantity.

9. In electronic as well as print environments, scholars and students should be assured privacy with regard to their use of materials.

The committee recognizes that adoption of these principles requires broad discussion among various stakeholders within the academic, public archiving and publishing communities. A number of initiatives related to the above principles are either in place or being introduced. Some examples of these activities are:

• A "Scholarly Communications Steering Committee" has been formed by the library under the chairperson of Myoung Wilson to initiate a university-wide discussion of the changing nature of scholarly communication for the teaching and research faculty at Rutgers and beyond. Some potential outcomes of these discussions are: moves by some faculty from submitting articles to high priced commercial journals to more academically-friendly lower priced journals; a move by some journal editors from boards of high priced commercial publications to lower priced high quality existing or new publications; creation of new web-based journals in competition with high priced commercial journals; leadership in advocacy by Rutgers faculty in their professional associations for new forms of scholarly communication.
• A university-wide committee is completing work on a revised policy on copyright and concepts in fair use that should provide the Rutgers community with clear guidelines on these issues in the traditional and digital arenas. A draft copy of the revised policy is planned to be available at the next full meeting of this committee on April, 26.
• Two year ago an e-biomed service (PubMedCentral) was initiated by the former director of N.I.H., Harold Varmus, to ensure that a robust electronic archive of life science research articles would be freely accessible to everyone. Over the past few months PubMedCentral has developed a new software architecture for the archive, built around the concept of a common template and a precise specification for data tagging. This new PubMed Central document type definition is based on the latest XML standards creates a more detailed and sustainable archival copy of an article than HTML. This method of archiving and coding stored documents may serve as the standard for arching electronic research works.
• A growing number of disciplines have been using electronic on-line journals and archiving of articles for several years as the medium for scholarly communication of research findings in their fields. Perhaps the best example of this practice is the Los Alamos e-print server, which has dramatically changed the way that physicists communicate the results of their scholarly research.
• Consortia of academic institutions have established collaborative publishing ventures as alternatives to commercial publishers. SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition) is an international alliance of over 200 college and research libraries building a more competitive scholarly communication marketplace (http://www.arl.org/sparc/DI) . TRLN is a collaborative organization of Duke, North Carolina Central., North Carolina State Universities and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill to create a rich knowledge environment that the universities' teaching, research and service missions.
• Statements on intellectual property and new media technologies have been published by the AAU:

http://www.aau.edu/IPReport.html : A framework for policy development at AAU universities.

http://www.aau.edu/IntlPropTP.html : Universities have a vested interest in intellectual property policies that provide appropriate proprietary protections and essential exceptions to those protections that assure access to information on which their research and education programs depend. Balanced policies would include: the continuation of fair use, first sale, and other longstanding exceptions to proprietary rights, enactment of provisions enabling the full development of digital distance education, and the avoidance of legislation that would over-protect databases.

• An international on-line discussion and debate sponsored by Nature of issues surrounding future e-access to published research has recently been introduced

http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/index.html.

There was general agreement by the Library Committee that the N.B.F.C. recognize the magnitude and importance of the global issue of scholarly communication in the digital era, and do all that it can to educate faculty and foster discussion of potential approaches to optimizing access to, and use of, electronic resources in their scholarly work and teaching. To this end, some members of the committee felt that it would be important to identify "niche" issues that could be presented in the form of resolutions or recommendations to the council. For example: What specific steps can we endorse/recommend to deal with the sky rocketing prices of commercial journals? If e-publications are encouraged by various disciplines, how should they be weighted in tenure decisions? Can we recommend a specific statement for the consideration of e-publications in a candidate's promotion package ? For example: as a statement to departments,

"Scholarly work published in electronic media, such as e-journals, should be considered as part of the quality and impact of a candidates research. The quality and significance of the specific electronic media in which the work appears should be documented via external letters solicited to evaluate the candidate."

And as a statement from the university, such as:

"Rutgers University appreciates that the Internet and new electronic technologies are having a major impact on how research is conducted and disseminated. We encourage you to include in your assessment any scholarly work by the candidate that published in electronic media. If you do so, we would also appreciate any explanations or comments you might have on the quality, significance and impact of such venues of publication"