Professional & Academic Publishing
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Projekt DEAL has reached agreement with a second publisher. The German national consortium announced a memorandum of understanding with Springer Nature. The basic contours of the deal are similar to the agreement the consortium reached with Wiley earlier this year. As with Wiley, this is a Publish and Read deal where the economics are structured entirely around the number of papers published with the publisher by consortium-affiliated researchers. The financial terms appear to be identical, with the German consortium paying a per-article PAR fee of €2,750 for publication in hybrid journals and receiving a 20% discount on the list price for publication in Gold OA titles.
The deal is also, just as with Wiley, based on publication of at least 9,500 articles per annum (though Springer Nature notes that they anticipate publication of over 13,000 articles). There is no mention of a cap on publication output, so presumably if German researchers do in fact publish more than 9,500 papers via Springer Nature, the publisher will be paid accordingly.
Faculty, students, and staff at more than 700 institutions across Germany will receive read access to the entire Springer Nature portfolio (including archival content) with the notable exception of Nature titles, which are excluded from the “PAR element” of the deal (presumably this means that the agreement with the German consortium includes read-only access to the Nature journals under a more traditional subscription framework but this is unclear).
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Source: Springer Nature
2
The American Astronomical Society has agreed to acquire Sky & Telescope (S&T) magazine and its related business assets (which go well beyond the standard fare for STM and scholarly publishers), including astronomy-themed tours, S&T-branded books, sky atlases, globes, apps, and other stargazing products. The acquisition is part of a program to reach out to backyard astronomers, many of whom assist their brethren on the professional side with close and frequent observations. Clarke & Esposito served as an advisor to AAS on the transaction.
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Source: American Astronomical Society
3
In a report released by Elsevier and Sense about Science, we learn that researchers now spend almost as much time searching for articles as actually reading them. Writing about the report in Research Information, Elsevier’s Adrian Mulligan notes that “On average, researchers spend just over four hours searching for research articles a week and more than five hours reading them.” Advances in search technologies do not appear to be helping with the problem: “Between 2011 and 2019, researchers have been reading 10 percent fewer articles, but are spending 11 percent more time finding articles.”
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Source: Elsevier, Research Information
4
Roger Schonfeld of Ithaka S+R has offered some observations on the current state of library negotiations with the larger commercial publishers. The Big Deal is under pressure for a variety of reasons, and the recent action by CDL to cancel its arrangement with Elsevier underscores the increased leverage (in part due to the availability of articles via Sci-Hub and ResearchGate) some libraries now have with publishers. But not all libraries, and certainly not all consortia, are configured like CDL, which represents one of the world’s largest institutions as measured by research output. Libraries and consortia with a more diverse makeup are likely not to seek fully transformative arrangements (that is, a complete flip of their institutions’ output to open access), instead pursuing arrangements that speak to their institutional needs. These libraries are scrutinizing their contracts carefully and often go into negotiations not to flip the nature of a deal or even to gain significant discounts on price; rather, they seek to get more from their collection dollars, insisting that publishers provide greater value in exchange for the cost of a subscription. This may lead to a situation where the largest incumbent publishers “lock in” their library revenue, to the detriment of smaller or entirely new publishers —a problem that is much on our minds.
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Source: The Scholarly Kitchen
5
Daniel Ropers steps down as CEO of Springer Nature after less than two years at the helm; Frank Vrancken Peeters, the company’s chief commercial officer, has assumed the role.
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Source: The Bookseller
Higher Education
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Celebrated MIT Media Lab Director Joi Ito has departed amid a fundraising scandal that has rocked the MIT community. Last month it came to light that Ito had solicited funds from Jeffrey Esptein—both for the Media Lab and for Ito’s venture capital fund. Two researchers announced they were leaving the lab in protest and the MIT community was divided as to whether Ito should remain as director or go. Despite calls for Ito’s resignation, there was also a petition of support signed by 250 current and former MIT faculty and staff as well as alumni.
Ito issued an apology and subsequently convened a town hall meeting, which he referred to as the start of “a process of dialogue and recovery.” At the meeting he indicated the scope of the donations from Epstein to the Media Lab amounted to $525,000. As the dust settled following what by all accounts was a raucous meeting, it appeared that Ito would likely remain at his post. However, 48 hours later The New Yorker published a devastating article by Ronan Farrow that documented not $525,000 but at least $7.5 million in donations to the Media Lab either made or secured by Epstein. According to Farrow (who obtained a cache of emails from Ito to Media Lab staff from a whistle-blower), Ito directed Media Lab staff to obscure Epstein’s involvement in these donations.
“The effort to conceal the lab’s contact with Epstein was so widely known that some staff in the office of the lab’s director, Joi Ito, referred to Epstein as Voldemort or ‘he who must not be named,’” wrote Farrow.
The next day Ito stepped down as Media Lab Director, and also left board seats at The New York Times, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and the MacArthur Foundation.
In a stunning development, the following week MIT president L. Rafael Reif acknowledged that members of his senior team were aware of—and approved—the donations from Epstein to the Media Lab and that he himself signed a letter thanking Epstein for a donation in 2012.
The reverberations of this scandal will undoubtedly continue to play out at MIT and beyond, with implications for research funding across the academy.
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Source: MIT Technology Review, The New York Times, The Guardian, The Tech, MIT Media Lab, The New Yorker, MIT
7
Business is now the #1 undergraduate major in the U.S. Students flock to business education (or training, depending on one’s point of view) because they believe it will improve their economic prospects, but the data do not bear that out, as some years after graduation majors in other fields catch up and even surpass those with professional certification. This is one of two primary reasons that Johann N. Neem advocates the abolition of the business major, by which he presumably means the course of study and not the individuals enrolled in those programs. (Neem is professor of history at Western Washington University.) But the more important (according to Neem) “reason to abandon the business major is because business majors are antithetical to college education and unworthy of a college degree even if it could be proved that they do produce higher salaries.” Neem is unsparing in his criticism: “Undergraduate business majors are not just ineffective but unethical.” Getting rid of the business major will usher in a New Jerusalem: “As colleges once again gain clarity of purpose by abandoning the mission creep that has turned them into curricular shopping malls, campuses will again emphasize the core virtues of intellectual inquiry and academic achievement.” Considering the typically fractious communications on campuses, we will be on the lookout for that clarity of purpose.
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Source: The Chronicle Review
8
New details of the student debt crisis in the U.S. continue to come to light, and the news is troubling. According to a new Bloomberg Businessweek analysis, “U.S. student loan borrowers as a group are paying down about 1% of their federal debt every year. It’s as if a former student were reducing the balance of a typical $30,000 college loan by only $300 annually. At that rate, it’s almost unthinkable how long it would take to repay the government: a century.”
But the debt load itself is only part of the problem. Another scandal has been brewing for years that has mostly escaped attention. This is the problem of students who enter college, but do not graduate. The low completion rates in turn further complicate the student debt problem, as students who stop attending college may still have loans to repay and without the boost to their incomes that a degree would confer. The statistics on this are truly appalling: “Fewer than 60 percent of college freshmen graduate in six years, two years beyond what is considered ‘on time,’ and that rate has barely changed during the past decade. Community-college students are meant to earn an associate degree in two years, but even after having been in school for six years, fewer than 40 percent have graduated. The United States ranks 19th in graduation rates among the 28 countries studied by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, putting the country on a par with Lithuania and Slovenia.” Furthermore, “No one is held accountable for this sorry state of affairs. Nobody gets fired because students are dropping out.”
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Source: Bloomberg Businessweek, The Chronicle Review
The Book Business
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“Scholarly infrastructure, from discovery tools and metrics to business models, is moving on, and is in danger of leaving the monograph behind.” This is the conclusion of Mike Taylor, the head of metrics at Digital Science, writing in the LSE Impact Blog last month. The blog post is a useful distillation of the June 2019 Digital Science report titled “The State of Open Monographs,” authored by Taylor along with Sara Grimme, Michael Elliott, Cathy Holland, Peter Potter, and Charles Watkinson. The authors find that too many open monographs lack much of the basic infrastructure—DOIs, full-text XML, standardized usage metrics—long embraced by scholarly journals. Funding mechanisms and measures of impact also present particular challenges for open monographs. Funding remains a central challenge for open monographs given the substantially higher production costs as compared to journal articles. While chapter-level APCs might be comparable to journal APCs, this approach only works with contributed volumes. Monograph costs can be significant ($28,000–$40,000 is typical) and raising this kind of OA funding for single-author titles is exceedingly difficult. While we agree with the findings and prescriptions in the report (use DOIs and full-text XML for Pete’s sake!), we nonetheless caution readers of the report to maintain perspective. Using the American university press world as a sample, most books are still consumed in print, and the largest market even for academic titles is individuals.
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Source: LSE Impact Blog, Digital Science
Technology
10
There were two notable reports out this past month on open source publishing tools. The first is the “Mind the Gap Report,” published by MIT Press and authored by Maxwell et al. from the Canadian Institute for Studies in Publishing at Simon Fraser University. This report is essential reading for anyone interested in the current state of open source publishing tools. In addition to providing an overview of 52 open source tools (one to explore each week!), it helpfully situates the tools in a number of ways (journals vs. books, centralized vs. distributed, development language) and describes each tool’s primary function(s): authoring/editing, ingest/conversion, submission management, and so on. In addition to describing the tools, the report is insightful in assessing the challenging funding environment in which tool developers operate:
Most… funding… is derived from a research-funding model that prioritizes new knowledge creation. It rewards the novel, the exceptional, and the singular. There is, by contrast, relatively little available funding for long-term development, and little funding, or incentive, for collaboration across initiatives. The result is that individual projects end up competing for the same funding sources, potentially at cross-purposes, and at the risk of unsustainability.
One question we have been thinking about that was not asked in the report (but was helpfully asked by Roger Schonfeld in his review of the report) is whether the scholarly publishing sector is large enough to support sustainable open source tools? Many of the more notable open source initiatives (Apache, Firefox, Linux, Python) have large developer communities and strong institutional support from well-resourced companies. Scholarly publishing is relatively small and does not have the same levels of ongoing institutional support found in other sectors.
These concerns about sustainability were echoed in the “Mapping the Scholarly Communication Landscape 2019 Census” report by Katherine Skinner at the Educopia Institute. The report is fairly dense so we recommend starting with Skinner’s related blog post (the report was also covered by David Crotty in The Scholarly Kitchen) in which she notes seven structural challenges facing open source tools: chronic underfunding, a focus on innovation over maintenance; resource competition; contingent support; lack of business acumen; lack of accountability; and unclear impact assessments.
In related news, the Educopia Institute announced it is the principal recipient of a $2.2 million Arcadia grant to “improve scholarly publishing infrastructures.”
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Source: MIT Press, Educopia Institute
Miscellany
11
When you think of the New York Public Library, you think first of the lions out front and then… leap quickly to the tattoos of the staff?
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Source: The New York Public Library
12
This year marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Herman Melville, and the tributes are a-spouting everywhere. Jill Lepore has a fascinating biographical sketch of the author, from his birth in New York to his death, also in New York, in 1891. He died in obscurity. Early in life he went to sea (Moby-Dick was not an armchair adventure), which provided the material not only for his masterpiece but also for his popular (at the time) Typee and Omoo. A year after the publication of Moby-Dick he published Pierre, or, The Ambiguities, a strange and at times unsettling book with its many autobiographical hints. The Guardian describes Melville as “the author of the greatest unread novel in the English language,” and then goes on to boast of having read it multiple times (joining the millions who have been awestruck by this “unread” book). Indeed, in The Guardian’s telling it appears that the pursuit of Moby-Dick, the book, is as futile, if not as fatal, as Ahab’s pursuit of the whale itself. And if you find the book too long for a single sitting, you can always read the Twitter version. It is The Economist, though, which we think best captures the book’s emergent modernity, as it traces the travels of an early stage of the global energy industry. In this sense, Ahab was the direct ancestor of John D. Rockefeller, a leviathan of another sort. Serious scholars of Melville may wish to explore The Melville Society, whose journal, of course, is called Leviathan.
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Source: The New Yorker, The Guardian, The Economist, Twit Lit Classics, The Melville Society
13
We don’t often find an opportunity to cite The Onion on The Brief, but occasionally its clear-headed approach to human behavior is illuminating. With a reference to research performed by the Department of Psychology at The University of Chicago, The Onion reports that “the most effective method of overcoming procrastination was a beating delivered by an overseer whenever you stop working.” The study “was completed months before deadline thanks to our on-the-fly implementation of the methods described herein.” After bludgeoning, the second most effective way to prevent procrastination was to create a to-do list.
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Source: The Onion
14
We mourn the deaths of Corbin Gwaltney and Richard Booth. Gwaltney was the founder of The Chronicle of Higher Education. Booth, a colorful character, created an enormous used bookstore in Hay-on-Wye, turning the town into a tourist attraction.
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Source: The New York Times, BBC
From Our Own Pens
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Last month we recommended Alan Krueger’s new book, Rockonomics. Joe wrote a review of the book, which you can find on The Scholarly Kitchen.
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Source: The Scholarly Kitchen
Meetings & Events
We will be attending the following events. Let us know if you would like to set up some time to chat. We’d love to hear from you (info@ce-strategy.com).
- Platform Strategies, September 25–26, 2019, New York, NY
- STM Frankfurt, October 15, 2019, Frankfurt, Germany
- The Frankfurt Book Fair, October 16–17, 2019, Frankfurt, Germany
- The Charleston Conference, November 4–8, 2019, Charleston, SC
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If I can’t dance I don’t want to be in your revolution. ― Emma Goldman