Many friends and acquaintances have weighed in on the subject, as one might imagine. The PR apparatus at the University, unsurprisingly, wanted to pitch the removal of the catalog as a symbol of the growth of the digital library, with all of the forward-looking and progressive connotations that such a view might support. Most people, librarians and others, were surprised that we still had the card catalog. This included senior faculty who often opine as to how much they love browsing in the stacks but who haven’t actually been there for a decade or two. Younger people didn’t even know what it was. (The current graduating class, it is worth noting, were mostly not born when we retired the catalog.) Most of the library staff were happy to see the thing go. My own view turns out to be at the sentimental end. Forty-some years ago, card catalogs gave me a window on the world of scholarship that left me (and still leaves me) in awe. Of course we have the same information on line, and one is still awed by the resources of libraries great and small. But just as I will always remember Ebbets Field as the location of the first baseball game that I saw in person, the Queen Mary as my introduction to transatlantic travel, and the 6th edition of Samuleson’s introduction to Economics as, well, my introduction to economics, I’ll always remember the card catalog as the rich, powerful and brilliant piece of scholarship that it was, and as a place that I visited in eager anticipation of learning something new. I don’t think that I was ever disappointed.

And then came the plagues.

The week before the catalog was moved, I went down to the basement of the library to find my own cards and those of members of my family, with the intention of removing them and keeping them, why I don’t know. And I’ll never find out. I worked my way through the alphabet, to a box whose last drawer ended with “Cooper.” I figured that “Courant” couldn’t be very far away, but the next case started with “Da-” Where were the Courant cards? It turned out that some years ago there had been a water leak, undiscovered for weeks, that had led to water damage and subsequent mildew and mold. The cards had been destroyed at that time.

On March 8, the cases were trucked to Property Disposition. About half way through the exercise a case hit a sprinkler head, creating a torrent of rusty water, water that looked like blood and smelled worse, damaging hundreds of books (all of which were saved by our overwhelmingly competent preservation staff) and making quite a mess.

With Passover coming, I’m on the lookout for frogs.

I learned something important that at some level I already knew.

The most important single thing about the Google settlement, simultaneously its greatest achievement and among its most vexing features, is the treatment of orphaned works (in James Grimmelman’s witticism, “zombie” works). The problem, as we all know, is that there are millions – no one quite knows how many – of works that may or may not be in copyright and for which the rightsholder(s) may or may not exist and may or may not be aware of their rights. Our ability to use these works is thus much compromised: we run the risk that a copyright holder will appear and claim damages. As we all know, Congress’s efforts to make it easier and safer to use orphaned works have failed. Moreover, the most recent draft legislation would have imposed difficult and costly burdens on a potential user by requiring the would-be user to make substantial efforts to find any potential but unknown rightsholder.

Along comes the Google settlement, which solves at least part of the problem, for Google and the Book Rights Registry, at one fell swoop. (Only part of the problem, because works that were not registered with the copyright office will likely not be in the settlement and yet may be just as orphaned as those that are registered.) Under the settlement, revenues generated by orphaned works will be held in escrow for for five years, allowing time for a rightsholder to come forward. It’s a moving window; if the rightsholder comes forward in year 22, she gets revenues from year 17 on. Thus the products that Google sells to individuals and institutions can include, among other works, millions of orphans (zombies). Without the orphans, the great public benefit of the settlement – the ability to find and use much of the literature of the 20th century in digital form – would be much diminished.

At the same time, the disposition of the revenues attributed to orphaned works is one of my least favorite parts of the settlement. The unclaimed revenues go first to support the operations of the BRR, and then, after that, will be used for charitable purposes consistent with the interests of publishers and authors. As the head of a library that has lovingly cared for these works for decades, the notion that the fruits of our labors (and those of many others in many libraries) redound to the benefit of entities that did not write, publish, or curate these works sticks a bit in my craw. So I hope that authors, publishers, the court, and the public will be vigilant in making sure the BRR does not squander the unclaimed revenues on mismanagement, high salaries, and the like. The “charitable purposes” should be an objective, not a remainder for unclaimed funds.

The settlement also gives Google and the BRR, and no one else, the right to use the orphaned works in this way. A number of commentators, have noted problems that may arise from Google’s privileged position in this regard. But there is an obvious solution, one that was endorsed at the Columbia meeting by counsel for the Authors Guild, the AAP, and Google: Congress could pass a law, giving access to the same sort of scheme that Google and the BRR have under the Google Settlement to anyone. And they could pass some other law that makes it possible for people to responsibly use orphaned works, while preserving interests for the missing “parents” should they materialize. Jack Bernard and Susan Kornfield have proposed just such an architecture to “foster” these orphans. Google has also made a proposal that would be a huge improvement.

Given that the parties to the suit, libraries, and the public would all benefit from such legislation, it should be a societal imperative to pass it. I look forward to AAP, the Authors Guild, and Google lobbying and testifying in favor of such legislation. I’d be happy to be there, too.

Broadly, peer review is the set of mechanisms that enable scholars to have reliable access to the informed opinions of other scholars, in a way that allows that those informed opinions themselves to be subject to similar vetting.

Scholarship requires reliable and robust peer review, and the academy engages in peer review in a variety of ways, both direct and indirect. Peer reviewed publication is one method, and a fairly powerful one at that. If you read a paper in (for my field) Econometrica or the Journal of Political of Economy, you are reasonably confident that accomplished scholars in the field have made a judgment that the paper is of high technical quality and worth reading, and that experienced scholars have made a judgment that the paper is of interest beyond its narrow subfield. Those are valuable pieces of news as one is looking for a way to spend some time, and they also tell you something about the likely quality and accessibility of papers outside of one’s specialty, should one be branching out or needing some background information or trying to figure out who to consider for an open position in the department.

Similarly, the appearance of an article in a leading specialized journal, or of a monograph in a prestigious series published by a scholarly press, conveys valuable information (at least to the cognoscenti in the field) about the quality of the book or paper.

The peers who undertake the reviews are genuine peers. They are scholars whose judgment is trusted by experienced members of editorial boards, who are themselves generally senior scholars in the relevant field(s). Such people engage in peer review pretty much all the time. They go to seminars and talks, read draft manuscripts from students and colleagues, near and far, review grant proposals, engage in workshops, and vet tenure and promotion files. In short, the peers doing the reviews are active scholars engaged in active scholarship. (Sometimes they even spend some time writing their own stuff.) They could no more NOT provide “peer review” then they could give up reading and writing. Peer review is part and parcel of what serious scholars do.

I’d guess (and I would love to see a serious study) that the fraction of time that scholars spend engaged in formal peer review of publications – journal articles and monographs — is less than half of the time they spend on peer review in total. Moreover, the work that has traditionally been done under the aegis of publishers is increasingly being done in other settings. In fields where it is customary to post working papers on the web, interesting papers generate a good deal of peer review in the form of commentary from peers. Given that it takes essentially no time to move from word-processor to web posting, and that it often takes years to get from submission to a journal or scholarly press to formal publication, it’s not surprising that informal peer review is becoming more common. This is good news. Scholarship advances more rapidly if work can be widely shared relatively quickly and easily. Given that publication in the literal sense (making public) is now easy and cheap in the technical sense, it seems almost certain that informal review will grow relative to formal review.

For several years, I was the chief academic officer of the University of Michigan, and I have been involved in the review of tenure cases, grant proposals, journal articles and book manuscripts for more than 30 years. The most interesting and important of these activities are reviews associated with tenure and hiring. It is often argued (quite explicitly so by some) that without the reviews associated with publishing, the academy would be at a loss in making judgments about the quality and productivity of scholars. To be sure, for reasons adduced above, a record of publication in strong peer-reviewed settings conveys valuable information to tenure and search committees, chairs, deans, and provosts. But the fact of the matter is that we pay equal attention to other reviews, including (for some fields) those required to obtain research grants, and (for some fields) post-publication reviews that appear in journals and other venues. We also take very seriously the opinions of ad hoc reviewers, inside and outside of our institutions, who prepare and evaluate the case for promotion and hiring. Take away the information conveyed by publication venue, and these tasks become more difficult, to be sure, but by no means impossible. And the essential part – close reading of the work by peer reviewers – remains intact.

Just as it pays for almost all of the content that goes into scholarly publication, so too does the academy – colleges, universities, research centers, and the entitites that fund them – pay almost all of the costs of peer review.

Publishers provide many useful services, but they do not provide peer review. It is the peers themselves who do that essential work.

Publishers have pushed for this bill because they fear that open access mandates will reduce their profits. If people can access the research for free online, who will pay millions of dollars for subscriptions? Lots of people, actually, but that’s another post.

Instead of baldly admitting that what they seek is protection for their dying business model, publishers argue that the NIH Public Access policy violates their copyrights. The assertion is hogwash. Copyrights belong to authors before they belong to publishers. Authors can license their work however they please; the fact that they have traditionally signed over all of their rights to publishers without compensation does not mean they should continue doing so. Indeed, the case can be made that those who pay the authors — including public entities such as NIH and NSF that support research — could require assignment of some or all rights as a condition of receiving the grant in the first place. I wouldn’t favor such a policy, but it’s fatuous to suggest that Congress should limit the scope of contracts between grantors and grantees.

Allan Adler, VP of the Association of American Publishers, issued a statement in which he had the gall to say that “Government does not fund peer-reviewed journal articles—publishers do.”

That’s just not true. The NIH spends over $28 billion in taxpayer money annually to fund research. Researchers write articles about their findings, and their peers review those articles, without compensation from publishers. Without the research, there would be nothing to publish. Largely due to historical accident, publishers manage the peer review process, helping journal editors to badger referees into reviewing articles, generally for no pay. The value of the scientific expertise that goes into refereeing dwarfs that of the office expenses incurred by publishers in managing the process. The referees’ salaries are paid by universities and research institutes, not by publishers. Basically, we have a system in which the public pays for the research, the universities pay for the refereeing, the publishers pay for office work to coordinate the refereeing, and also for some useful editing. Then the publishers turn around and sell the results back to the universities and to the public who bore almost all of the costs in the first place.

The people of the United States pay good money to learn about the world. It would be a travesty if Congress decided that the interests of a few publishers were more important than the research investments of the American public, and that’s exactly what this bill would do.

There are any number of details that will have to be worked out before we know how the mandate will be implemented, and we will probably never know the precise effect on the world of scholarly publishing. But the vote of the Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences makes a point that should be widely applauded in the academy. Harvard University Librarian Robert Darnton put it well in his op-ed before the faculty vote:

The motion before the FAS provides a way to realign the means of communication in a way that will favor learning. It will be a first step toward freeing scholarship from the stranglehold of commercial publishers by making it freely available through our own university repository. Instead of being the passive victims of the system, we can seize the initiative and take charge of it.

What almost all faculty care about almost all of the time is the dissemination and use of their work, not its commercial consequences. We have always known this, of course, although organizations that purport to speak for the interests of authors frequently place inordinate emphasis on authors’ commercial interests. What the Harvard faculty has done is give us all a visible and powerful affirmation that what really matters is academic work itself, and not the profitability of particular industries that have grown up around it.

Faculty time and effort, in research, writing, and reviewing, are by far the most valuable ingredients of scholarly publication, and there is enormous scope for universities and faculties to reclaim publication and the associated profits from commercial enterprises. The problem of limited, over-priced access to scholarship is a big one, and the more different ways we try to fix it, the better our chances that a few of them will work. The declaration by Harvard’s faculty focuses on one strategy — mandated (or at least default) deposit into institutional repositories. But more important than the choice of strategy, the declaration reminds us of how much is at stake and why it matters.

It is somewhat troubling that some academic publishers and academic societies have expressed concern that the Harvard mandate will put them at mortal risk, while merely trimming the profits of the big commercial publishers. Plainly, we in the academy have an interest in robust nonprofit scholarly publishing, but we should not fall for the idea that the only way for nonprofit publishing to survive is through policies that assure huge profits to the big players. (There is an analogy to agricultural policy here. In the name of preserving the “family farm,” governments around the world provide billions in subsidy to agribusiness.)

For now, let me repeat that the big news in the Harvard vote is that it helps all of us to focus on the main point — which is that scholarly publishing, through a variety of mechanisms, is first and foremost about making scholarship public, not making money. So, strange as it may sound coming from Ann Arbor: Go Crimson!

The obvious problem is that recessions bring with them reductions in income – the stuff that state legislatures and student households use to support universities, and wealth – the stuff that constitutes university endowments. Much has been written recently about the terrific endowment growth that universities experienced during fiscal year 2007. Well, the stock market has been falling quite sharply for the last several months, and I’ll bet that the number of universities whose endowments grow appreciably in the current fiscal year will be fairly small. So, the sources of the money that we spend on collections and services are likely to be under stress in the next year or so, and libraries will get to share in some of the pain that our institutions will experience. (There is a longer discussion, that I will provide at some point, about the problems that arise when institutions that collect with an eye to the needs of users over years and decades have to deal with the vagaries of budgets that bounce around from year to year. Briefly, it would be good for both us and our universities to try to smooth out the effects of the business cycle, but that’s not easy to do.)

The less obvious problem has to do with the indirect effects that a recession will have on the behavior of publishers and media companies as they continue to press Congress for protection against all and sundry, most emphatically including libraries. Bill Patry has a number of nice discussions of the remarkably disingenuous rhetorical turn undertaken by publishers, the RIAA, and other representatives of copyright holders as they cloak simple greed in the language of the moral high ground.

Claims that copyright involves human rights or is a property right are based on the theory that copyright is also a natural right — a right that exists independent of legislative enactment, even if there are legislative enactments. In the United States, copyright is not a natural right, since the Supreme Court has said so twice, first in 1834 in Wheaton v. Peters, and then in 1932 in Fox Film Corp. v. Doyal. Yet, rhetoric based on a natural rights basis for copyright are behind all the claims that those who use copyrighted works without permission are thieves or pirates. If copyright is instead a limited privilege that parcels out limited control to copyright owners, one might view issues differently. [Patry Copyright Blog, Jan. 18, 2008]

What does this have to do with recessions? Well, one of the things that happens when times are tough is that those who are having tough times seek public relief. Quite appropriately, Congress and the President are now working on developing a stimulus package to aid the economy as a whole, and the Federal Reserve has just implemented a cut in interest rates designed to forestall a recession. But individual industries will also seek specialized relief, and will attribute their problems to causes for which they have favorite cures. The favorite cure for the media companies, of course, is ever-tighter intellectual property laws, with ever-greater limitation (or at least a climate of fear) around legitimate fair uses. Just watch, if a recession unfolds, as the media go back to Congress and ask for protection against the public and the libraries, even though the causes of their current problems are changes in technology to which they have adapted badly, as well as the recession itself.

The Kindle is plainly many wonderful things, and does many wonderful things, and, for most purposes, is a pretty poor substitute for a book. (At the same time, for some purposes, such as carrying a substantial library on a long trip, or augmenting that library at 4AM from a hotel room in a strange land, or getting the best price on some content from Amazon, it’s much better than a book.)

I acquired a Sony Reader about a year ago, and I like it just fine, although if I have time, space, and carrying capacity, I invariably prefer a book. When I first played with the Sony I thought that pretty soon now, there would be readers that would make e-books very good substitutes for p-books. A year or two and lots of development costs later, I’m not so sure. Put simply, what is most striking about the buzz around the Kindle is that (almost) no one is saying that it is a revolutionary, next generation improvement over its predecessor. It’s better at some things, has a much better interface for actually acquiring content, and so on. It’s wow, but not “WOW, I’m going to throw away my library and convert the space into a billiard room.”

Here’s an instructive contrast – JSTOR. When JSTOR made the back issues of the leading economics journals available digitally, I did throw away part of my library and repurpose the space. JSTOR made it possible for me to skim and read any article in the relevant journals. Of course, even then if I was really going to read the article, I would print it out, the better for carrying around and making marginal notes.

As we all know, electronic versions of academic journals have been very successful, and most academic libraries are now choosing the electronic form in preference to print for a large fraction of their serials. How do faculty and students use these resources? They search them on the screen, and often skim them on the screen, and if they want to read them carefully they print them out and carry them around. Thus, I claim that the great success of e-journals can be attributed in no small part to the fact that their content comes in easy, print-sized chunks.

I’m betting that something similar will be true of e-books. They will really take off when their publishers admit that on-screen (in either computer or reader) is not the best medium for serious and sustained reading, and develop and use technical and rights environments that allow cheap and convenient print on demand. It’s wonderful to be able to search and to skim on screen, but when you want to read, there is nothing like a book or a printed article. The Kindle and the Reader are great; I wouldn’t leave home without one. But, like almost everyone, I do most of my reading at or near home.

It’s not that I hate the practice, which I view as a pinnacle of human achievement, without which the life and work of many (including me) would be meaningless. It’s that the phrase itself connotes a mechanical process, rather than the transcendent purpose that underlies the activity itself.

Decoding the term “scholarly communication” requires us to consider other adjectives as applied to communication. Not all that many are in common use, and most that are refer to technology or to style, e.g. “terse communication,” “telephonic communication” (an archaic usage that is not all that old), “written communication,” “verbal communication.” None of these is properly parallel with “scholarly communication,” where the modifier of “communication” signifies a type of work. If we look at other lines of work that involve communicating we find no good linguistic parallels. I, at least, have never heard of “journalistic communication,” “artistic communication,” “filmic (?) communication,” “photographic communication,” “dramatic communication,” or the like. Rather one speaks of journalism, art, film, photography, etc.

The obvious parallel to all of these noble lines of work is simply “scholarship,” and indeed, as I have argued elsewhere, scholarship without communication isn’t well defined, because an essential part of scholarship is making one’s work public by contributing one’s thoughts and knowledge to the scholarly literature. (Note, by the way, that we have many modifiers of the word “literature” that are fully parallel to this usage.) Moreover, an extremely important part of the practice of scholarship, namely private communication between and among scholars, is NOT included in the conventional meaning of the term “scholarly communication.” That’s because what we really mean to be talking about when we say “scholarly communication” is scholarly publication, by which I mean the set of mechanisms (and associated rules and practices) by which scholarship is made public. The mechanisms include traditional and less traditional methods of publication (inter alia , monographs, blogs, simple postings on websites) plus traditional and nontraditional methods of presentation, including lectures, YouTube clips and podcasts, plus the zillions of ways that these and other technologies of communication can be combined.

I think that what we are usually talking about when we use the term “scholarly communication” is the business of making scholarly things public, including, of course, the economic viability of academic journals and academic presses, as well as the copyright and other legal and regulatory regimes that affect the business of making scholarship public. (For continuing valuable treatment of these subjects, see Scholarly Communications@Duke, a fine blog in everything but name.)

So, we are looking for a phrase that means something like, “the physical and economic mechanisms used to make scholarship public.” As I have implicitly suggested above, there is a perfectly good phrase to describe this, right out of the dictionary. The OED defines “publishing” as “the act of making something publicly known,” which is exactly the notion that we are looking for. If we want to distinguish between scholarly publishing generally and the particular activities and vicissitudes of university presses, we could speak specifically of “academic press publishing,” and also of “academic publishing,” which would connote a part of the publishing business aimed at the academy, parallel to trade publishing, or mass-market publishing. As in the commercial cases, many media would be included in addition to print books and print journals.

In the end, my point is simple: We seek to understand and improve the mechanisms used to make scholarly work public, and we would like a word or phrase to describe the object of our study. The terms “publishing” and “publication” connote our interest precisely, whereas “communication” does not. Indeed, much communication has nothing to do with making things public. (Consider “confidential communication,” which is commonplace, in juxtaposition to “confidential publication,” which is simply bizarre.)

Of course, I have no realistic hope of changing the words that we use to discuss these important matters. Once a term of art gets entrenched in the academy, it is rarely dislodged, and “scholarly publishing” has come to mean “what academic presses do,” while “scholarly communication” has come to mean what I said at the top of the previous paragraph. So I expect that this amiable rant will have no effect, but the tradition of amiable ranting is well established in both scholarship and blogging, and one can always hope for miracles.