Scholarly Communication at Texas A&M

A hot-off-the-press announcement [sent yesterday as a detailed email to graduate schools; today available as an official press release on their website] from ProQuest reveals that they will no longer charge institutions for uploading electronic theses and dissertations to the ProQuest digital database. This cataclysmic change will go into affect on September 27, 2010 for all clients who use the ProQuest ETD Administrator tool to handle the transfer of ETD files and metadata to the company. This means a savings of $65/$55 per dissertation or thesis, respectively.

For institutions not using the proprietary upload tool, fees will still apply. Also, the option of publishing the ETD via Open Access will still cost $95. per document, regardless of submission method.

Once the shock wears off over this announcement, an analysis on what this development means for scholarly publishing, libraries and the ETD community will be forthcoming. I promise! For now, it’s enough to celebrate this windfall reduction in cost for graduate students.

The American Mathematical Society (AMS) has established a complete digital archive of its mathematical research journals. Over 34,000 articles are available from over 100 years of high-quality mathematical research in ‘Journal of the AMS,’ ‘Mathematics of Computation,’ ‘Proceedings of the AMS,”Transactions of the AMS,’ and ‘Bulletin of the AMS.’ All back issues, starting with each journal’s inaugural issue through 2005, are now freely available in electronic format.

Researchers can browse the contents of each journal to find articles and authors in each volume and issue, and can search across the entire archive by journal or group of journals at: http://www.ams.org/joursearch/. View the abstract, references (with links to MathSciNet), bibliographic information, Mathematics Subject Classifications for each article, or view a PDF of the full article.

Each journal is unique in its offering of articles, book reviews, and reports. AMS journals have consistently been managed by editors highly prominent in their fields.

The AMS makes the digitized archive of these important research journals freely available to all mathematicians through the generosity of an anonymous donor.

The University of Central Florida (UCF), a global public research university with comprehensive graduate programs at the master’s and doctoral levels, has announced that their students’ electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) will soon be made available “to a much wider audience”. Beginning in Fall 2010 UCF ETD’s will be contributed to freely accessible national and international databases including the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations (NDLTD) and the Worldwide ETD Index. In addition, UCF ETDs will be made available to web crawlers to show up in search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Bing.

As part of this change in administrative process, submission to the fee-based repository operated by ProQuest/UMI will not longer be required and will not be included in the University’s routine ETD submission workflow. Individual colleges or schools may continue to require that students submit their dissertation to ProQuest/UMI on their own. Additionally, students are welcome to contribute their thesis or dissertation to additional repositories including Open Thesis, Internet Archive’s Text Archive, or subject specific repositories. Further information about the University’s new ETD submission process are available from the Library website.

In making the change to fully Open Access ETD submission and publishing, UCF joins a number of other North American institutions who no longer require graduate students to send their work to a proprietary publisher. Others in this category include Stanford University, University of Texas at Austin, Virginia Tech, University of Tennessee (Knoxville), Louisiana State, Laval University, and the University of British Columbia.

Every morning I read highlights from Inside Higher Ed and The Chronicle of Higher Education and the headlines were U. of California System Threatens Boycott Over Journal Prices and  U. of California Tries Just Saying No to Rising Journal Costs.  This was a very interesting way to start the day.  According to a memo issued to all University of California Divisional Chairs and members of the faculty, the Nature Publishing Group has proposed a 400% — that is four hundred percent — increase in the cost of NPG journals in 2011. The California Digital Library, the electronic library serving all UC system schools, has responded to NPG by vowing to forgo all online subscriptions to new NPG journals. Given the sad state of public higher education budgets in California, the CDL warned that more drastic measures might be necessary.  The memo encourages UC system faculty take action by resigning from editorial and advisory boards and declining to peer review for NPG journals, and to refrain from submitting manuscripts to Nature Publishing Group journals, among others.

The UC System is certainly one of the most powerful public higher education systems in the US, and the system libraries have the clout to stand up to commercial publishers when most libraries can only wring their hands (so to speak), then pay up (by canceling other subscriptions or purchasing fewer books.  Dropping prestigious Nature Publishing Group journals is hardly an option for research intensive institutions, unless the faculty who read and publish in those journals are on board. What CDL has managed to do — brilliantly — is engage faculty in the discussion of the costs of scholarly publishing.  This is not “just” a library issue.

I will be following this story closely!

The full text of the memo can be found at http://libraries.ucsd.edu/collections/Nature_Faculty_Letter-June_2010.pdf.

Readers interested in the role of peer review in the evolving world of scholarly communication may want to look at the newly released edited volume, Peer Review In Academic Promotion And Publishing: Its Meaning, Locus, And Future . Produced by the Future of Scholarly Communication Project at UC Berkeley’s Center for Studies in Higher Education, this volume contains four working papers that consider the state of peer review in academia and its role in scholarly publishing. Topics covered in the working papers include:

• which forms of peer review are used for which specific academic purposes (e.g., tenure and promotion, publishing, extramural funding, national and international stature)
• the considerable costs to universities in subsidizing the entire peer review process through faculty salaries, and
• the perception that, although peer review represents the best available system, there are nonetheless a multitude of problems with it…”

The four working papers were developed and circulated as read-ahead material for a series of recent meetings sponsored at the Berkeley Center. The authors review the various costs leading to unstainablilty of today’s schaolarly publishing entrprise, and assess the most commonly cited reforms and alterntiatrves to the system. They conclude with a recognition that there is a need to improve the current system:

“there is a need for a more nuanced academic reward system that is less dependent on citation metrics, slavish adherence to marquee journals and university presses, and the growing tendency of institutions to outsource assessment of scholarship to such proxies.”

Yet the authors also concede that reforms and alternates to the current peer review system introduce their own shortcomings, noting that “the current system is.. .generally cited as successful, warts and all, insofar as it ‘picks out the best and gets rid of the worst.’” Ultimately, then, Peer Review In Academic Promotion And Publishing: Its Meaning, Locus, And Future raises many questions about the sustainability of the current peer review system; offers few proven solutions; but provides much food for thought and debate.