{Received March 5, 1999.]
Recent contributions to the Newsletter on Serials Pricing Issues from Jennifer Kostelnik and Stephen J. Bensman ask important questions about SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) and its mission. In responding, I would like not only to speak directly about SPARC's plans, but to address the need for a multi-faceted engagement with the journals pricing problem. It is a complex matter involving unprecedented technology shifts, economic forces that have been a generation in the making, and the heterogeneous cultures of scientific communities and academic institutions. During the past decade, there has been considerable debate about how best to transform scholarly publishing, and though a variety of solutions has been proffered, none has yet been so widely embraced that the underlying structures have shifted appreciably.
Many participants in the discussion have staked their claim to one potential solution or another, serving as effective champions of change and calling attention to needs and options. SPARC was created to support these efforts in all their diversity; it is built around a unifying ideology that embraces and complements such initiatives. The central idea is that competitive market forces must be unleashed if the status quo is to be challenged. This simple, but not simplistic, idea is intended to give voice to a range of actions, to demonstrate at last our readiness to act in concert.
SPARC has not been the first to call for competition as a response to the growing journals crisis. The roots may be seen, for example, in the 1998 Pew Higher Education Roundtable report, "To Publish and Perish," which called for libraries to "be smart shoppers." In 1994, the AAU Task Force on a National Strategy for Managing Scientific and Technological Information recommended that universities take action to "introduce more competition and cost-based pricing into the marketplace for STI by encouraging a mix of commercial and not-for-profit organizations to engage in electronic publication of the results of scientific research." And in 1989 a study of the serials market prepared for ARL by Economic Consulting Services Inc. said "the library community would benefit greatly from such measures as the encouragement of new entrants into the business of serials publishing, and the introduction of a program to stimulate greater competition among publishers."
Competition is the one overarching ideology that today enjoys broad support among the disparate stakeholders in the scholarly communication process, including scientists in wide-ranging disciplines, librarians, administrators, and professional societies. The far-reaching support SPARC has obtained in the short time since its birth is testament to the potency of this idea. SPARC's agenda is entirely compatible with a range of proposals for potential systemic change -- reform of promotion and tenure policies, NEAR and other proposals that would alter copyright assignment practices, "decoupling" of peer review and publication, or a broad scale move to the document delivery model, for example. Each approach has merit and is complementary to SPARC. But each option also is a potentially long-term, risky undertaking.
SPARC was created because there is growing consensus in the scientific, academic, and library communities that it is time to stop talking and start acting. A few laudable ventures, such as HighWire Press, apparently feel the same way.
SPARC is not a single-minded venture: the "SPARC Alternatives" program to support lower-priced alternatives to high-priced titles is but the first of a series of initiatives to test for soft spots and demonstrate where the leverage points are. In the months since SPARC was formally launched in June 1998, it has focused on supporting competition with high-priced scientific journals as a means of constraining and reducing prices. The logic is that: 1) if authors have superior alternatives to existing high-priced journals, they will ultimately move to the outlet that better satisfies their need for both recognition and broad dissemination, and 2) if publishers have market support for bold (but inherently risky) new ventures, they are more likely to make the investment. SPARC seeks to get the ball rolling by offering prestige, readers, and reduced risk through its "publisher partnership" programs:
* SPARC collaborates with qualified scientific societies and other organizations that have strong, well-established ties to authors and can attract leading editors to alternative journals. These editors attract leading research, and that in turn expands upon the reflected prestige of the editors.
* SPARC imbues partners' journals with a measure of its own growing prestige via the SPARC endorsement. For this to have expanded and enduring value, it is essential that SPARC build broad and favorable recognition among scientists. In a short time, SPARC has achieved some success here, having obtained extensive press coverage in media consumed by scientists, including Science, Nature, the New York Times and many others (see http://www.arl.org/sparc/news.html).
* SPARC publishing partners will create products that, over time, develop inherent prestige based on the quality of service they offer -- perhaps enabling convenient professional collaboration in the authoring phase, delivering research faster, being more responsive to authors' needs for evenhanded relationships with their publishers, offering expanded rights to authors over their intellectual property, and providing a robust environment for communicating knowledge.
SPARC support is not limited to startup ventures. We are also interested in aiding market-friendly journals that can demonstrate a plan to build upon their established position of prestige and value to win away articles from high unit-price journals in adjacent or niche content areas and offer these articles at lower unit prices. This may be an attractive avenue for societies with strong "brand equity" to leverage their name and publishing scale to drive down the cost of disseminating research.
But what about readers -- how will SPARC ensure that research is widely used and valued? Traditionally it takes years for a new journal to establish itself. During the building period it can be difficult to attract authors, and without authors, there's no prestige (and ultimately no journal). Here's where SPARC's library support is invaluable. SPARC library members have earmarked funds to support the journals published by our partners. So in a relatively short period of time a journal can have a respectable base of readers as a foundation upon which to further build its circulation and attractiveness to authors. SPARC expects its endorsement of new ventures will draw attention and subscriptions from the broader market beyond SPARC's membership.
SPARC also supplies an incentive to shift publishers' product development expenditures away from creating unique new journals that fill the gap between two established titles ("twigging"). By reducing the risk of competing against an established title, we offer motivation for publishers to direct their investment toward offering consumers a choice. This gives societies, for example, an inducement to launch titles that reclaim key ground lost to commercial publishers. Such strategic action will be essential in the world ahead, in which control of a critical mass of content will decide who dominates the users' desktop.
In addition to its support of competition via the "SPARC Alternatives" publisher partnership program, SPARC is already engaged in identifying other solutions that explore the dynamic of migrating content to more cost-efficient outlets:
* SPARC Scientific Communities Initiative: SPARC will be providing seed capital to stimulate and accelerate creation of new university-based "scientific information communities" serving users in key segments of science, technology, or medicine (what has been called the "discipline-based server model"). This model offers a promising strategy for addressing inefficiencies in the current scholarly communication process. It warrants investments that demonstrate its potential to transform the scientific journals market to the benefit of science and academe. Qualified projects will provide increased responsiveness to the needs of authors and information users by bypassing high-cost/low-value elements of the traditional value chain in distribution of primary information. This will happen by offering a compelling alternative for publication of scientific research in a specified discipline; aggregating content/links needed by targeted users in sufficient breadth and mass to address a substantial proportion of their routine secondary research needs; and delivering convenient access to this information in a Web environment optimized to the needs of scientists in the target discipline (but with the capacity to provide integration of content across disciplines in the future). These ventures will be operated on a non-profit basis. They will be accountable to authors and their institutions, and might be created via partnerships among libraries, university presses, and professional societies.
* Education: For change to occur, there needs to be a broader understanding among authors of why it is in their interest to support change. For that reason, SPARC is engaged in an active program to carry our message to the scientific community via a range of communication and education activities. Each of our partnerships tells a story that resonates with authors and demonstrates the benefit of their being part of a solution. By helping to carry these stories to their institutional communities, SPARC members and other libraries can play a critical role in instigating change by getting authors to question their support of the current system. At the same time, SPARC can serve to remind libraries of the importance of concentrating their limited funds on journals that offer better value for money.
* SPARC Leading Edge Program: This is a parallel to the "SPARC Alternatives" publisher partnership program that supports lower-cost alternatives to high-priced journals. In contrast, SPARC Leading Edge partnerships will help advance ventures that introduce or demonstrate innovative business models or address the information needs of an emerging or fast-growing STM field. Here SPARC seeks to leapfrog the competition by nurturing and promoting initiatives that approach scientific communication from new directions or that beat the competitors to the punch.
* Market Research: Better understanding what will motivate authors to support alternative outlets for their research is essential if we are to impel change. SPARC will be investing in this kind of research and will make it available to our collaborators and to our broader constituency. This spring, for example, a study sponsored by SPARC and the American Chemical Society will explore how chemists use the web to communicate research findings to colleagues. Our findings will be made available publicly.
To address the complex problems facing scholarly communication, it is vital that people get involved. Scientists, their professional societies, libraries, and academe must mobilize now or risk standing on the sidelines as research increasingly is sold like widgets to the highest bidder. Indeed there is cause for optimism that scientists are now in a strong position to turn back the commoditization of their research. First, there is growing author awareness that all is not right in Camelot. Biologist Mike Rosenzweig, editor of the new breakaway journal Evolutionary Ecology Research, has likened this growing awareness to a "slave revolt."
A number of other factors suggest the time is ripe for action. Changes in technology and an ever-growing appetite for high profits makes traditional commercial players vulnerable to competition. The instinctively defensive posture of large, highly profitable corporations can make them hesitant to take risk and slow to act. And the constantly evolving nature of science makes it unlikely they will rest on their laurels -- though their ability to buy out the innovators certainly provides some remedy for sluggishness.
We are on the verge of massive changes in the ways research is consumed, and with this will come a re-evaluation of traditional brand loyalties. At the risk of over-generalizing, the leading market positions today are frequently occupied by society journals that deliver benchmark quality and value. Often we find arrayed around society publications a range of second-tier and niche publications from commercial publishers. Bensman is right to point this out. With change afoot, publishers of the leading journals have an opportunity -- if they have a vision -- to leverage their positions to offer new and efficient outlets for research. To do so they must win the support of scientists by offering superior alternatives. In the final analysis, it is the publisher -- professional society, academic enterprise, or commercial entity -- that must address the central job of winning authors.
As both Kostelnik and Bensman write, the central question is how authors will be motivated to migrate from current high-priced journals to new, more cost-effective outlets for their research findings. This topic has been debated for some time, and, until recently, precious little was being done within the scientific or academic communities beyond discussion. Certainly there are a few shining examples of what can be accomplished -- such as the Los Alamos-based E-Print Archive. But relatively little has yet been accomplished in extending this success and winning authors in more than a few fields.
Working through SPARC or via other avenues, libraries can play powerful roles in the metamorphosis now underway by supporting the emergence of new journals in which control is exercised by a community of scientists and users. But even more powerful is for each of us to take personal responsibility for carrying the message to authors -- to remind them that they have the capacity to build a better system, that each time they submit an article they vote for the kind of system they want. SPARC will be creating materials to support libraries in undertaking this task. But with or without SPARC, libraries must act to harness their greatest strength: the enthusiasm and creativity available to carry the message to faculty and drive change.
Everyone except those who are the beneficiaries of the status quo would welcome a single transformative solution. But no such single solution has yet gained a critical mass of support. SPARC is the first international effort of its type to receive broad backing, and it seeks to use this both to support systemic transformations and to offer near-term opportunities to build a more responsive market. Implicit is that there will be successes and failures -- just as we see in the dynamic world of Silicon Valley-style Internet startups.
A key step in addressing any market, including the scientific journals market, is to understand its segmentation and the forces and motivations at work on it. That's what SPARC is doing. Solutions won't come to us in a vision or overnight. And they won't come from SPARC alone. They will evolve and emerge through the kind of market engagement SPARC and others have begun. By starting at the beginning, putting one foot ahead of the other, SPARC is initiating and fostering change that will ultimately lead to more open and accessible scholarly communications.
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Statements of fact and opinion appearing in the Newsletter on Serials Pricing Issues are made on the responsibility of the authors alone, and do not imply the endorsement of the editor, the editorial board, or the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
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The Newsletter on Serials Pricing Issues (ISSN: 1046-3410) is published by the editor through Academic Technology and Networks at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, as news is available. Editor: Marcia Tuttle, Internet: marcia_tuttle@unc.edu; Telephone: 919 929-3513; Fax: 919 960-0847. Editorial Board: Keith Courtney (Taylor and Francis Ltd), Fred Friend (University College, London), Birdie MacLennan (University of Vermont), Michael Markwith (Swets Subscription Services, Inc.), James Mouw (University of Chicago), Heather Steele (Blackwell's Periodicals Division), David Stern (Yale University), and Scott Wicks (Cornell University).
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