JOI to the Library

“This might be too geeky for a column,” said the subject line of a reader's email, “but just in case …”

It sounded like a challenge, and I took the bait. The topic in question? A new statistical instrument to quantify the degree of open access for scholarly journals. In other words, exactly geeky enough.

The metric can, in principle,  be used with journals in any field. At this stage, though, it’s only really being talked about in library and information science (LIS) circles. It represents a challenge to academic librarians to “walk the talk” in regard to their own professional publications. But it's an “inside baseball” discussion that merits attention outside the dugout, given the role of academic librarians in shaping the whole terrain of 21st-century scholarly communication.

That role is crucial but often overlooked. Academic librarians still have the core responsibilities of managing acquisitions and maintaining subscriptions, of course, but must also keep track of the new array (constantly growing, across all disciplines) of digital-format archives, databases, and other repositories. Plus they have the pedagogical task of instructing patrons in how to use new research tools as they become available.

As if that weren’t enough to do, research libraries have been mutating into scholarly publishers in their own right, sometimes in cooperation with their universities’ presses. To borrow a phrase from a recent paper in the journal College & Research Libraries, academic librarians have gone beyond being “gatekeepers of knowledge” -- in charge of its storage and retrieval -- to playing an active role in its promulgation.

Cassidy R. Sugimoto and the other seven authors of “Beyond Gatekeepers of Knowledge: Scholarly Communication Practices of Academic Librarians and Archivists at ARL Institutions” are all in the School of Library and Information Science at Indiana University at Bloomington. The abbreviation in their subtitle refers to to the Association of Research Libraries, which has 125 affiliated institutions in North America.

Sugimoto et al. sent a survey to their colleagues at 91 academic libraries in the U.S. about how they kept track of developments within library and information science itself. Just over six hundred people filled out all or most of the questionnaire.

The findings reveal a profession that's seriously interested in its own rapidly changing role in scholarly communications: "A vast majority (94.2 percent) consult professional literature" -- defined to include scholarly journals as well as less formal venues such as trade publications and blogs — "on, at the very least, a monthly basis.” More than a quarter of respondents said they did so daily.

Over 80 percent of respondents indicated they followed peer-reviewed LIS journals. More three-quarters kept up with conference papers and proceedings in their field. "Nearly three-quarters," the paper notes, "reported sharing the results of research or reports of best practices" with their colleagues, with more than half (54.2 percent) doing so in peer-reviewed journals."

The other, more granular statistics in the paper are significant, but I want to stress a couple of important big-picture issues suggested by the study. On the one hand, the Indiana researchers describe a kind of virtuous circle. Academic librarians are eager both to produce and to exchange knowledge about their field -- not just to publish but to read one another’s work and to incorporate it into their own activity. (And that is a good thing for the rest of us, prone though we are to taking their efforts for granted.)

The paper also stresses that academic librarians have been advocates for "new (particularly open) systems of scholarly communication." They have shown prescient and growing support for open-access publishing for a number of years now. But here's where things become problematic, because it sounds like the library and information studies people could use some "new (particularly open) systems of scholarly communication” of their own.

Librarians who are also tenure-track faculty need to publish in the field's major peer-reviewed journals. (Forty percent of respondents to the Indiana researchers’ survey were either tenured or on the track.)

But with a prestigious journal, the lag time between between acceptance and publication can run to a year or more. That delay "impede[s] the timeliness and back-and-forth exchanges that are required for effective scholarly communication." And in "technology-related fields ... research may lose its currency if it is not delivered expediently."

Then there is the conundrum assessed in another recent study, Micah Vandergrift and Chealsye Bowley's "Librarian Heal Thyself: A Scholarly Communication Analysis of LIS Journals,” published last month by In the Library With a Lead Pipe, which is probably the best name ever for a peer-reviewed journal. (Vandergrift is a scholarly communications librarian at Florida State University. Bowley is library supervisor at FSU's Florence Study Center in Italy.)

While academic librarians have been strong advocates of open-access publishing, many LIS researchers seem to exempt their own field. One study the authors cite found that half of respondents “cared mostly about publication without considering the policies of the journals in which they published and that only 16 percent had exercised the right to self-archive in the institutional archive.”

Vandegrift and Bowley assembled data on the policies of 111 library and information science journals and found that with a large minority of them (well over a third) the author signs over all copyrights to the publisher — “including but not limited,” as the contracts run, "to the right to publish, republish, transmit, sell, distribute, and otherwise use the [article] in whole or in part … in derivative works throughout the world, in all languages, and in all media of expression now known or later developed.” (You could probably get away with giving the PDF to a close friend, just be very, very quiet about it.)

Just a handful of journals “had direct or implied policies regarding what the author is allowed to do with specific versions of the same work,” including self-archiving in an institutional repository. “A significant percentage of our professional literature,” Vandegrift and Bowley conclude, "is still owned and controlled by commercial publishers whose role in scholarly communication is to maintain ’the scholarly record,’ yes, but also to generate profits at the expense of library budgets by selling our intellectual property back to us.”

A norm doesn’t remain a norm unless nearly everyone involved acquiesces to it. A couple of years ago The Economist referred to the signs of growing unhappiness with the state of scholarly publishing as "The Academic Spring," and Vandegraft and Bowley's paper is part of it.

"A great example of a proactive and outspoken group,” Bowley told me in an email exchange, "was the Journal of Library Administration's Editor-in-Chief Damon Jaggars and entire editorial board who resigned in March 2013 … [over] an author agreement that they thought was "too restrictive and out of step with the expectation of authors.” Vandegrift was among the authors who had requested a Creative Commons license or to retain their copyright — an open-access policy that Taylor & Francis, the journal’s publisher, rejected.

Continuing the effort to bring the publishing practices of LIS researchers into accord with its ethos, Vandegrift and Bowled have created an instrument called the Journal Openness Index. It uses a points system for the various degrees of control over copyright and reuse indicated in a journal’s stated policies. The higher the JOI, the more open-access the publication. Crunching the numbers for several leading LIS titles, the authors find that the journals of professional societies get the highest scores while those from commercial-academic publishers get the lowest, with journals issued by university presses falling somewhere in between.

That is not exactly counterintuitive. But Vandegrift and Bowley offer JOI as a step in the direction of establishing open access as one of the criteria for how colleagues assess the value of scholarship in their own field.

"I imagine all the students that come out of library schools,” Vandegraft said by email, who "go into public librarianship and all of a sudden are cut off from access to the literature that can and should inform the practice of their work, which they were trained to do in library schools where ‘access' is touted as a value. I think we can do better, and I think it will take articles like this one to push librarians to be more proactive and to ask our faculty colleagues to join us."

As for applying JOI to journals in other fields, the idea is feasible but demanding. “Such a project would need proper backing,“ Bowley told me, "whether in the form of a team or institutional and financial support, in order to ensure its long-term upkeep. It could also be partially done through crowdsourcing the information, though. If a professional organization or institution is interested in taking up the project, they would certainly be welcomed to do so.”

I hope their colleagues take them up on it. An informed librarian is a helpful librarian — and it’s a fool who underestimates the value of that.