what-if? – ACRL TechConnect

2016: The Year Open Access Broke?

It’s Open Access Week, which for scholarly communications librarians and institutional repository managers is one of the big events of the year to reflect on our work and educate others. Over the years, it has become less necessary to explain what open access is. Rather, everyone seems to have a perception of open access and an opinion about it. But those perceptions and opinions may not be based on the original tenets of the open access movement. The commercialization of open access means that it may now seem too expensive to pursue for individuals to publish open access, and too complicated for institutions to attempt without buying a product.

In some ways, the open access movement is analogous to punk music–a movement that grew out of protest and DIY sensibilities, but was quickly coopted as soon as it became financially successful. While it was never free or easy to make work open access, changes in the market recently might make it feel even more expensive and complicated. Those who want to continue to build open access repositories and promote open access need to understand where their institution fits in the larger picture, the motivations of researchers and administration, and be able to put the right solutions together to avoid serious missteps that will set back the open access movement.

Like many exciting new ideas, open access is partially a victim of its own success. Heather Morrison has kept for the past ten years a tally of the dramatic growth of open access in an on-going series. Her post for this year’s Open Access Week is the source for the statistics in this paragraph. Open access content makes up a sizeable portion of online content, and therefore is more of a market force. BASE now includes 100 million articles. Directory of Open Access Journals, even after the stricter inclusion process, has an 11% growth in article level searching with around 500,000 items. There are well over a billion items with a Creative Commons license. These numbers are staggering, and give a picture of how overwhelming the amount of content available all told is, much less open access. But it also means that almost everyone doing academic research will have benefited from open access content. Not everyone who has used open access (or Creative Commons licensed) content will know what it is, but as it permeates more of the web it becomes more and more relevant. It also becomes much harder to manage, and dealing with that complexity requires new solutions–which may bring new areas of profit.

An example of this new type of service is 1Science, which launched a year ago. This is a service that helps libraries manage their open access collections, both in terms of understanding what is available in their subscribed collections as well as their faculty output. 1Science grew out of longer term research projects around emerging bibliometrics, started by Eric Archambault, and according to their About Us page started as a way to improve findability of open access content, and grew into a suite of tools that analyzes collections for open access content availability. The market is now there for this to be a service that libraries are interested in purchasing. Similar moves happened with alternative metrics in the last few years as well (for instance, Plum Analytics).

But the big story for commercial open access in 2016 was Elsevier. Elsevier already had a large stable of open access author-pays journals, with fees of up to $5000. That is the traditional way that large commercial publishers have participated in open access. But Elsevier has made several moves in 2016 that are changing the face of open access. They acquired SSRN in May, which built on their acquisition of Mendeley in 2013, and hints at a longer term strategy for combining a content platform and social citation network that potentially could form a new type of open access product that could be marketed to libraries. Their move into different business models for open access is also illustrated in their controversial partnership with the University of Florida. This uses an API to harvest content from ScienceDirect published by UF researchers, but will not provide access to those without subscriptions except to certain accepted manuscripts, and grew out of a recognition that UF researchers published heavily in Elsevier journals and that working directly with Elsevier would allow them to get a large dataset of their researchers’ content and funder compliance status more easily. ¹ There is a lot to unpack in this partnership, but the fact that it can even take place shows that open access–particularly funder compliance for open access versions–is something about which university administration outside the library in the Office of Research Services is taking note. Such a partnership serves certain institutional needs, but it does not create an open access repository, and in most ways serves the needs of the publisher in driving content to their platform (though UF did get a mention of interlibrary loan into the process rather than just a paywall). It also removes incentives for UF faculty to publish in non-Elsevier journals, since their content in those journals will become even easier to find, and there will be no need to look elsewhere for open access grant compliance. Either way, this type of move takes the control of open access out of the hands of libraries, just as so many previous deals with commercial enterprises have done.

As I said in the beginning of this piece, more and more people already know about and benefit from open access, but all those people have different motivations. I break those into three categories, and which administrative unit I think is most likely to care about that aspect of open access:

Open access is about the justice of wider access to academic content or getting back at the big publishers for exploitative practices. These people aren’t going to be that interested in a commercial open access solution, except inasmuch as it allows more access for a lower cost–for instance, a hosted institutional repository that doesn’t require institutional investment in developers. This group may include librarians and individual researchers.
Open access is about following the rules for a grant-funded project since so many of those require open access versions of articles. Such requirements lead to an increase in author-pays open access, since publishers can command a higher fee that can be part of the grant award or subsidized by an institution. Repositories to serve these requirements and to address these needs are in progress but still murky to many. This group may include the Office of Research Services or Office of Institutional Research.
“Open access” is synonymous with putting articles or article citations online to create a portfolio for reputation-building purposes. This last group is going to find something like that UF/Elsevier partnership to be a great situation, since they may not be aware of how many people cannot actually read the published articles. This last group may include administrators concerned with building the institution’s reputation.

For librarians who fall into the first category but are sensitive to the needs of everyone in each category, it’s important to select the right balance of solutions to meet everyone’s needs but still maintain the integrity of the open access repository. That said, this is not easy. Meeting these variety of needs is exactly why some of these new products are entering the market, and it may seem easier to go with one of them even if it’s not exactly the right long-term solution. I see this as an important continuing challenge facing librarians who believe in open access, and have to underpin future repository and outreach strategies.

Russell, Judith C.; Wise, Alicia; Dinsmore, Chelsea S.; Spears, Laura I.; Phillips, Robert V.; and Taylor, Laurie (2016) “Academic Library and Publisher Collaboration: Utilizing an Institutional Repository to Maximize the Visibility and Impact of Articles by University Authors,” Collaborative Librarianship: Vol. 8: Iss. 2, Article 4.
Available at: http://digitalcommons.du.edu/collaborativelibrarianship/vol8/iss2/4. ↩

The Internet of Things meets the Library of Things

If the New York Times article The Internet Gets Physical is any indication, a sea change is approaching in just how smart everyday appliances are going to become. In theory, smart infrastructure will connect you and any appliance with an IP address to everything else.

For example: your car will talk to your phone. Appliances like your computer, and chair, and desk, interact over the web. Data will be passed via standard web technologies from every Internet-capable appliance. Everyday consumer electronics will be de facto networked to the Internet. The overall effect of these smart objects means the possibility of new library services and research environments.

According to the New Media Consortium’s 2012 Horizon Report, the Internet of things is made possible by the IPV6 initiative, which essentially allows for the explosion of IP addresses across the globe and in your everyday life:

“with the advent of the New Internet Protocol, version six, those objects can now have an IP address, enabling their information store to be accessed in the same way a webcam might be, allowing real-time access to that information from anywhere… the implications are not yet clear, but it is evident that hundreds of billions of devices — from delicate lab equipment to refrigerators to next-generation home security systems — will soon be designed to take advantage of such connections…” (p.8)

What are the implications of the physical Internet in library settings?

Your smart phone interacts with the library building

The ways in which mobile apps can interact with the library building is not yet fully realized; for example, should your phone and the building be able to tell you things such as the interrelations among your physical presence and searches you’ve done on your home or office computer – or places you’ve driven past in your commute; or where you spend you leisure hours? Who makes the choices of suggesting resources to you based on the information in all of your life-sensors? Surely libraries will need filtering algorithms to control for allowable data referencing but where and how will we implement such recommender services?

Smart digital shelving units

What if a future digital shelf arrangement could be responsive to your personal preferences? For example – the library building’s digital smart infrastructure could respond to your circulation history or Internet searches in a way that shelves could promote content to you in real time. What would this recommendation look like for individual research, study, or browsing? And how would libraries be able to leverage such a service?

Digital library integration with physical objects

Smart objects allow libraries to consider how to make the virtual presence (databases, e-books, ILS data) physical. Many libraries would welcome a more physical instantiation of vended software products, since to a certain extent, users believe the library’s collection consists of only the things that they can see in the library.

The 2012 NMC Horizon Report indicates that smart objects are on the far term horizon. So it may be four to five years before they affect higher eduction — what is your plan for smart objects in the library environment?

Additional Resources

Action Analytics

What is Action Analytics?

If you say “analytics” to most technology-savvy librarians, they think of Google Analytics or similar web analytics services. Many libraries are using such sophisticated data collection and analyses to improve the user experience on library-controlled sites. But the standard library analytics are retrospective: what have users done in the past? Have we designed our web platforms and pages successfully, and where do we need to change them?

Technology is enabling a different kind of future-oriented analytics. Action Analytics is evidence-based, combines data sets from different silos, and uses actions, performance, and data from the past to provide recommendations and actionable intelligence meant to influence future actions at both the institutional and the individual level. We’re familiar with these services in library-like contexts such as Amazon’s “customers who bought this item also bought” book recommendations and Netflix’s “other movies you might enjoy”.

BookSeer β by Apt

Action Analytics in the Academic Library Landscape

It was a presentation by Mark David Milliron at Educause 2011 on “Analytics Today: Getting Smarter About Emerging Technology, Diverse Students, and the Completion Challenge” that made me think about the possibilities of the interventionist aspect of analytics for libraries. He described the complex dependencies between inter-generational poverty transmission, education as a disrupter, drop-out rates for first generation college students, and other factors such international competition and the job market. Then he moved on to the role of sophisticated analytics and data platforms and spoke about how it can help individual students succeed by using technology to deliver the right resource at the right time to the right student. Where do these sorts of analytics fit into the academic library landscape?

If your library is like my library, the pressure to prove your value to strategic campus initiatives such student success and retention is increasing. But assessing services with most analytics is past-oriented; how do we add the kind of library analytics that provide a useful intervention or recommendation? These analytics could be designed to help an individual student choose a database, or trigger a recommendation to dive deeper into reference services like chat reference or individual appointments. We need to design platforms and technology that can integrate data from various campus sources, do some predictive modeling, and deliver a timely text message to an English 101 student that recommends using these databases for the first writing assignment, or suggests an individual research appointment with the appropriate subject specialist (and a link to the appointment scheduler) to every honors students a month into their thesis year.

Privacy Implications

But should we? Are these sorts of interventions creepy and stalker-ish?* Would this be seen as an invasion of privacy? Does the use of data in this way collide with the profession’s ethical obligation and historical commitment to keep individual patron’s reading, browsing, or viewing habits private?

Every librarian I’ve discussed this with felt the same unease. I’m left with a series of questions: Have technology and online data gathering changed the context and meaning of privacy in such fundamental ways that we need to take a long hard look at our assumptions, especially in the academic environment? (Short answer — yes.) Are there ways to manage opt-in and opt-out preferences for these sorts of services so these services are only offered to those who want them? And does that miss the point? Aren’t we trying to influence the students who are unaware of library services and how the library could help them succeed?

Furthermore, are we modeling our ideas of “creepiness” and our adamant rejection of any “intervention” on the face-to-face model of the past that involved a feeling of personal surveillance and possible social judgment by live flesh persons? The phone app Mobilyze helps those with clinical depression avoid known triggers by suggesting preventative measures. The software is highly personalized and combines all kinds of data collected by the phone with self-reported mood diaries. Researcher Colin Depp observes that participants felt that the impersonal advice delivered via technology was easier to act on than “say, getting advice from their mother.”**

While I am not suggesting in any way that libraries move away from face-to-face, personalized encounters at public service desks, is there room for another model for delivering assistance? A model that some students might find less intrusive, less invasive, and more effective — precisely because it is technological and impersonal? And given the struggle that some students have to succeed in school, and the staggering debt that most of them incur, where exactly are our moral imperatives in delivering academic services in an increasingly personalized, technology-infused, data-dependent environment?

Increasingly, health services, commercial entities, and technologies such as browsers and social networking environments that are deeply embedded in most people’s lives, use these sorts of action analytics to allow the remote monitoring of our aging parents, sell us things, and match us with potential dates. Some of these uses are for the benefit of the user; some are for the benefit of the data gatherer. The moment from the Milliron presentation that really stayed with me was the poignant question that a student in a focus group asked him: “Can you use information about me…to help me?”

Can we? What do you think?

* For a recent article on academic libraries and Facebook that addresses some of these issues, see Nancy Kim Phillips, Academic Library Use of Facebook: Building Relationships with Students, The Journal of Academic Librarianship, Volume 37, Issue 6, December 2011, Pages 512-522, ISSN 0099-1333, 10.1016/j.acalib.2011.07.008 . See also a very recent New York Times article on use of analytics by companies which discusses the creepiness factor.

The Start-Up Library

“Here’s an analogy. The invention of calculus was shocking because for a long time it had simply been presumed that you couldn’t divide by zero. The integrity of math itself seemed to depend on the presumption. Then some genius titans came along and said, “Yeah, maybe you can’t divide by zero, but what would happen if you “could”? We’re going to come as close to doing it as we can, to see what happens.” – David Foster Wallace*

What if a library operated more like an Internet start-up and less like a library?

To be a library in the digital era is to steward legacy systems and practices of an era long past. Contemporary librarianship is at its worst when it accepts the poorly crafted vended services and offers poorly thought through service models, simply because this is the way we have always operated.

Internet start-ups, in the decade of 2010, heavily feature software as a service. The online presence to the Internet start-up is of foundational concern since it isn’t simply a “presence” to the start-up — the online environment is the only environment for the Internet start-up.

Search services would act and look contemporary

If we were an Internet start-up, we wouldn’t use instructional services as a crutch that would somehow correct poor design in our catalogs or other discovery layers. We wouldn’t accept the poorly designed vendor databases we currently accept. We would ask for interfaces that act and look contemporary, and if vendors did not deliver, we would make our own. And we would do this in 30-day time-lines, not six months and not years to roll out, as is the current lamentable state of library software services.

Students in the current era will look at a traditional library catalog search box and say: “that looks very 90s” – we shouldn’t be amused by that comment, unless of course we are trying to look 20 years out of date.

We would embrace perpetual beta.

If the library thought of its software services more like Internet start-ups, we would not be so cautious — we would perpetually improve and innovate in our software offerings. Think of the technology giants Google and Apple, they are never content to rest on laurels, everyday they get up and they invent like their lives depended on it. Do we?

We wouldn’t settle.

For years we’ve accepted legacy ILS systems – we need to move away from accepting the status quo, the way things have always been done, and the way we always work is not the way we should always work — if the information environments have changed, shouldn’t this be reflected in the library’s software services?

We would be bold.

We need to look at massive re-wiring in the way we think about software as a service in libraries; we are smarter and better than mediocrity.

The notion of software services in libraries may be dramatically improved if we thought of our gateways and virtual experiences more like Internet start-ups conceptualize their do or die services; which are seemingly made more effective and efficient every thirty to sixty days.

If Internet start-ups ran their web services the way libraries contently run legacy systems, the company would surely fold, or more likely, never have attracted seed funding to start operating as a start-up. Let’s do our profession a favor and turn the lights out on the library way of running libraries. Let’s run our library as if it were an Internet start-up.

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* also: “… this purely theoretical construct wound up yielding incredibly practical results. Suddenly you could plot the area under curves and do rate-change calculations. Just about every material convenience we now enjoy is a consequence of this “as if.” But what if Leibniz and Newton had wanted to divide by zero only to show jaded audiences how cool and rebellious they were? It’d never have happened, because that kind of motivation doesn’t yield results. It’s hollow. Dividing-as-if-by-zero was titanic and ingenuous because it was in the service of something. The math world’s shock was a price they had to pay, not a payoff in itself.” – David Foster Wallace