What was the best April fools joke I've seen?

I can't remember the best april fools joke I heard. I have heard a lot of them so it is hard to remember the best one. I never really said that one paticular one was the best. There will always be a better one so it is pointless to try and say one is the best.

What is the last thing I learned?

The last thing I learned was how to graph log functions in algebra 3-4 yesterdy. All we had to do was plug it in our calculater and it gave us the points to graph and we graphed them. It is really simple. I wish all math was that easy. That is the last thing that I learned.

How much have I changed in the last year?

I don't think I have changed much in the last year besides getting my drivers license. Other than that I haven't really chaanged. I kept all of the same friends as last year and I look the same. I changed more between freshman and sophomore year than last year and this year. Between those years I became more mature and made a lot of new friends. That is when I changed.

RUP’s Mike Rossner: Doing what’s right

Scholarly publishing is going through some hectic times. At the beginning of the year it was engulfed in the controversy over the Research Works Act (RWA), which would have rolled back the Public Access Policy introduced by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) in 2005, and forbidden other federal agencies from introducing similar policies.

Mike Rossner

Confronted by an outcry from the research community, publishers began to distance themselves from the act, or they dithered, and the saga ended in a big win for the Open Access (OA) movement.

Hot on the heels of the RWA comes the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA). This would achieve the very opposite of the RWA: It would strengthen the NIH Policy by reducing the embargo period before research papers must be made freely available online, from 12 months to six months; and it would require that all the major agencies of the federal government introduce the new strengthened policy.

Right now the FRPAA is still alive and kicking, but under attack from publishers, who have described it as “little more than an attempt at intellectual eminent domain, but without fair compensation to authors and publishers.”

As the war of words between OA advocates and publishers begins anew, one publisher stands out for taking an independent line — the executive director of Rockefeller University Press (RUP) Mike Rossner. In fact, this is not the first time that Rossner has disagreed with other publishers (e.g. see here, here and here), but it is always refreshing (not to say liberating) when one witnesses individuals standing out from the crowd.

True to form, Rossner has released a letter to librarians outlining his position in the current debate. Yesterday he forwarded the letter to me and invited me to share it, which I am happy to do. As I felt the letter invited a few questions I put those to Rossner first. The short Q&A can be read below the letter.

I am reminded of what Rossner told SPARC in 2009, when he was honoured as a SPARC Innovator: “I don’t see myself as going against the grain, I see myself as doing what’s right.”

What is undeniable is that if all scholarly publishers approached the world in the way that Mike Rossner does, a great many more research papers would be freely accessible on the Web today!

Dear Librarian,

I am writing to clarify the position of The Rockefeller University Press (RUP) on various legislative efforts regarding public access to publications resulting from federally funded research. RUP is a member of the Association of American Publishers (AAP) and the Association of American University Presses (AAUP), who have both recently provided position statements on this issue. However, RUP does not agree with those statements.

RUP is a subscription-based publisher that publishes three biomedical research journals: The Journal of Cell Biology, The Journal of Experimental Medicine, and The Journal of General Physiology. We have released our back content to the public since 2001 – long before any federal mandates existed – because we believe we have an obligation to give something back to the public that funds the research we publish.

The AAP supported the now-defunct Research Works Act. RUP strongly opposed that act.

Both the AAP and AAUP have opposed the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA), which has been re-introduced into both the House and Senate. Although numerous non-profit publishers signed the AAP letter, the RUP does not stand with those publishers. RUP supports FRPAA in principle.  We know from the NIH public access policy that mandated access to the results of federally-funded research is necessary to get certain publishers to release this content to the public, and we support legislation to extend the NIH policy to other large federal funding agencies.

The AAP and AAUP use a one-size-does-not-fit-all argument to oppose FRPAA because the drafted legislation calls for all large federal agencies to mandate public access six months after publication. Although it can be argued that a six-month embargo period may not be suitable for all disciplines covered by FRPAA, this is not grounds to oppose the legislation altogether. It should be supported in principle and could be modified during Congressional review to provide the flexibility for each agency to choose its own embargo period.

The continuing rhetoric from the AAP and AAUP about having ongoing "conversations" about access to the results of publicly funded research is outdated. There is legislation on the table that will help to make public access a reality now.

Yours sincerely,

Mike Rossner
Executive Director

These comments are the opinion of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of The Rockefeller University.

Q&A:

RP:  I note that what you have sent me is a letter addressed to librarians. Can you say what your message is to RUP authors and readers?

MR: The note was addressed to librarians because it was sent to our list of institutional site managers. Our message is the same to RUP authors and readers.

RP:  You perhaps saw Stevan Harnad’s response to your letter? I know the term “public access” is widely used in the US, but has Stevan got a point? While members of the public clearly have an interest in ensuring that their tax dollars are spent effectively, is not the benefit of open access that it enables researchers to access each other’s papers, not that it allows the public to read them? Do you think these two issues are sometimes conflated?

MR: Stevan distinguished researcher access from public access. Since we release all of our back content to the public, the two are functionally equivalent from our perspective.

RP:  Would it be fair to conclude you feel that both the AAP and AAUP have lost sight of the big picture so far as scholarly communication is concerned, and that they can no longer see the wood for the trees when it comes to the issue of OA?

MR: I cannot speak to the perspectives of those organizations. I imagine that they believe their positions represent the opinions of the majority of their members, although I have not seen any polling data to this effect.

RP:  Given the apparent gulf that has opened up between RUP and both the AAP and AAUP, I am wondering what value there is in RUP remaining a member. Why does RUP not resign from these two organisations?

MR: I believe that there is value in presenting a dissenting opinion from within an organization. Being a member gives me a voice over communications networks to which I would otherwise not have access.

RP:  You say that RUP supports the FRPAA “in principle”. Can you say more about the reservations RUP has about the bill, which perhaps encompass more than the embargo period alone?

MR: My reservations encompass only the uniform embargo period. I strongly support the principle of mandated public access.

Magazine Cover Plan

My plan for my maazine cover is to take a picture of my ipod. I cant bring a car or motorcycle in for my picture to match wth my business so I'll just use that. I will make shorts quotes to describe different things in the technological world. That is my plan for my magazine cover.

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Spring Break

My spring break was pretty good. I hung out with my friends both weekends. I also went to the Spring training game yesterday at Peoria Sports Complex. During the week I mostly stayed home and watched my brother but I did  hang out with friends.On Tuesday I went to the mall and on Friday I went to the mall. I was able to finish my forensics project too over the break. My spring break was pretty good. Now I cant wait to finish the last nine weeks of my Jr. year.

Hve I been on any vacations? Where?

I have been on a lot of vacations I go on two a year. I also go to California about 6 times a year. My favorite vacation was when I went to Hawaii 2 years ago. I got to see a lot of new things. I went surfing everyday in the morning before the beach got to crowded. I also got to go snorkling and see a lot of fish that I have never seen before that. That was my favorite trip that I have gone on.

What is the most frightening thing thats happened to me?

I can honestly that nothing real frightening has happened to me. If I had to say something frightening it would probably be when I nearly rolled my quad down a 75ft hill. It was upp in the forest and I was going t fast up the hill and my tire caught a rock and nearly caused the quad to flip over. After it just gave me a rush of adrenaline but it wasn't fun while it was happening.

Open Access, brick by brick

Last month Elsevier withdrew its support for the controversial Research Works Act (RWA). Had it become law, the RWA would have rolled back the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Public Access Policy requiring that funded researchers make their papers freely available on the Web within 12 months of publication. It would also have outlawed other US federal agencies from introducing similar policies. As such, the bill was a direct assault on Green Open Access. But while Elsevier’s retreat was a big win for supporters of Open Access (OA), OA will continue to be a brick-by-brick process — as evidenced by recent events in Australia.

In stepping away from the RWA, Elsevier acknowledged that it had made a strategic mistake. It clearly also made a serious PR gaffe. Whether the company has done lasting damage to its relationship with the research community remains uncertain, but the fact that researchers are continuing to sign up to the boycott Elsevier web site — created in protest at the publisher’s support for the bill — must clearly be a cause for concern.

What the RWA fiasco underlines is that while publishers are increasingly willing to embrace Gold OA (OA publishing), their antipathy towards Green OA (self-archiving) is growing, particularly where it is mandatory.

For that reason, Elsevier’s decision should be viewed as a political act alone, not a change of heart. Indeed, in announcing its withdrawal the publisher stressed that it remains firmly opposed to OA mandates.

Moreover, while OA advocates maintain that most publishers are now comfortable with the NIH policy this is surely only wish fulfilment. A week after the RWA died, after all, 81 publishers signed a letter opposing the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA).

Introduced into both the US Senate and the House of Representatives on 9^th February, far from outlawing the NIH policy, the FRPAA would propagate it — to around a dozen other US federal agencies. It would also reduce the embargo period from 12 months to six. As such, the bill would be a huge fillip for Green OA — although with the US elections approaching it seems highly unlikely to succeed, in the near future at least.

In short, the battle for OA goes on, but looks set to be fought primarily over Green OA henceforward.

Down under

Recent events on the other side of the globe would appear to confirm this. They also demonstrate that while the OA movement was victorious in the battle over the RWA, the war itself is far from over.

In a development generally under-reported outside Australia (pushed aside by the hubbub over the RWA perhaps), on 21st February the Australian National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) announced that it plans to introduce an NIH-style mandate — effective July 1st.

This is undoubtedly another win for OA advocates but, as we have discovered with the open wars, every success is often accompanied by a failure.

Let’s examine what happened in Australia.

Colin Steele

The story appears to begin on January 5th, when Colin Steele, emeritus fellow of the Australian National University and convenor of the National Scholarly Communications Forum, published an opinion piece in The Australian. This alerted the research community down under to the RWA, and called on Australian universities to make a public statement in support of the NIH Policy and of Open Access.

With the title “Scholarly Licence to Print Money”, Steele’s piece concluded, “Ultimately, the prime issue is surely to disseminate university knowledge, which has been funded by taxpayers, as effectively and openly as possible, rather than for that knowledge simply to continue to be a source for large publisher profits and for manipulable metrics for research assessment exercises.”

Then on February 15th Justin Norrie, news editor at the Australian information service The Conversation, published a story about the Elsevier boycott, pointing out that 97 Australian academics had joined the pledge not to publish in or edit Elsevier journals.

In writing his article Norrie spoke to Danny Kingsley, the Australian National University’s manager of scholarly communications and e-publishing. And he quoted Kingsley saying, “The problem in Australia is that the research councils — the Australian Research Council and the National Health and Medical Research Council — award funding to academics who publish their work in the journals that are judged under a metrics system to have the most impact.”

As a result, Kingsley added, “if academics boycott those journals, it could really hurt their careers. It’s easier to give in to their extortionate efforts to extract money than to join a boycott.”

Kingsley’s remark stung the CEO of the NHMRC Warwick Anderson into responding: In a comment piece published in The Conversation six days later, Anderson denied that NHMRC funding decisions are based on journal impact factors. “This is not true. NHMRC removed journal impact factors from its assessments some years ago.”

And to demonstrate that he understands the rationale and necessity for OA, Anderson added that the NHMRC would soon be upgrading its OA policy. “One of the important benefits that the public expects from publicly funded health and medical research is access to the published findings of that research,” he wrote.

For that reason, he added, “From July this year, we will be mandating the deposit of publication outputs arising from NHMRC funded research into an institutional repository within 12 months of publication.”

For the moment the details of the mandate are not know, but the news was greeted enthusiastically. Since 2007 NHMRC has merely “encouraged” researchers to embrace OA, a policy now widely viewed as having failed.

Observers, however, were surprised at the turn of events, pointing out that it was an unusual way for a research funder to announce a change in policy. And the assumption was that Anderson’s announcement was a direct response to the controversy surrounding the RWA.

As always, of course, reality is more complicated than it seems. In fact, the NHMRC has been contemplating making OA mandatory for some years. Norrie had even signalled the policy change in his February article.

Insiders report that the NHMRC mandate was first mooted after a visit to Australia by Harold Varmus in 2008. Varmus has been an advocate for OA for many years and is a former director of the NIH. He is also a co-founder of OA publisher Public Library of Science (PLoS).

Following Varmus’ visit, says Steele, “the NHMRC were much taken with following the NIH policy.”

As first conceived, the NHMRC mandate would actually have been more OA-friendly than the NIH policy, since it was planned to allow publishers to impose no longer than a six-month embargo before papers were made freely available — half the period the NIH allows. However, following lobbying by publishers, notably Wiley-Blackwell, the NHMRC delayed its decision, and eventually watered it down to a 12-month embargo.

“The new NHMRC policy is stronger than the old one,” says US-based OA advocate Peter Suber. “The earlier policy encouraged OA without requiring it, but asked non-complying grantees to justify their non-compliance. That extra request put it above ordinary encouragement policies, just as the explicit requirement in the new policy puts it above the previous policy.”

However, he adds, “The 12 month embargo is a disappointment. NHMRC is following the NIH policy, of course.  But in this respect the NIH is the outlier, not the norm. To my knowledge, NHMRC is the first medical funder with an OA policy, after the NIH, to allow an embargo longer than 6 months.”

For all that, the announcement of the NHMRC mandate, if not the decision itself, does appear to have been triggered by the controversy over the RWA, although Steele puts it this way: “I don’t think their announcement was provoked by the Elsevier controversy, but rather by the interview with Danny Kingsley in The Conversation. But they were nearly ready to go with the mandate by then in any case.”

War of attrition

Whatever the reason for the timing, and the manner, of the announcement however, it serves to remind us that the path to OA rarely runs straight. Indeed, OA often seems more like a war of attrition than a movement. And sometimes it is a case of one step forward, two steps back.

Our Australian story demonstrates this well enough. Observers suggest that one reason for NHMRC’s delay was that the funder had hoped to be able to make a joint announcement with the Australian Research Council (ARC), as had been done in 2007 when they both announced their current policy of “encouraging” OA.

In the event, it appears that ARC is not prepared to move to a mandatory position right now. At least we have to assume that, since its public statements about OA tend to be more gnomic than illuminating, and somewhat contradictory.

A week after Anderson’s announcement, for instance, The Australian raised the issue of an OA mandate with ARC chief executive Margaret Sheil. Sheil responded that “open access publishing” by grant recipients was encouraged where appropriate, but not demanded, by the ARC.

She added that there was less need for the ARC to impose a mandate, since ARC-funded research was not generally of interest to the public. “In the NHMRC's case, by and large, what the public is seeking access to is information regarding health and that's quite appropriate. In many areas of our research there is no community interest in the outcomes until much further down the track.”

Sheil seemed to be implying that the primary purpose of OA is to make research accessible to the public, rather than to other researchers. She also seemed of the view that to demand that researchers make the output of their work OA would jeopardise their careers and/or was not possible.

“In the humanities and many other areas it can be difficult to get published,” Sheil told The Australian. “And what do you do about research for which the main form of publication is books? It's not that hard for a scientist to get papers into some sort of repository that's open access.”

In the hope of clarifying ARC’s position I contacted the funder. Responding by email, an ARC spokeswoman said, “The ARC funds a more diverse range of disciplines and end users than the NHMRC, some of which would not be in a position to comply with a mandate — health and medical is more advanced than some ARC-funded disciplines.”

And she added, “The ARC encourages researchers to disseminate their findings as broadly as possible to allow access by other researchers and the wider community. In Australia, institutions, in general, have their own repositories and researchers have other means of attaining access to the papers they need through coordinated library subscription. The Australian Government Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) system has advanced the cause of open access by providing funding for institutional repositories.”

As the answer I had received invited further questions I emailed ARC again. Why, I asked, does ARC believe that some researchers would not be in a position to comply with a mandate? “The ARC does not want to put further barriers up for those research areas that, and early career researchers who, find it difficult to get published,” I was told, but with no explanation as to what exactly these further barriers might be.

I also asked ARC if it could confirm whether or not it intended to impose a mandate. “Our comments relate to current policy, which is all we will comment on,” I was told.

Deeply frustrating

Unsurprisingly, ARC’s reluctance to mandate OA is deeply frustrating for local OA advocates. Since ARC manages around A$845 million ($900 million) of taxpayer’s money each year, they point out, it is a public interest issue, and one deserving of greater clarity.

Arthur Sale

“Unfortunately the lack of action by the ARC means that taxpayer funded research is hidden behind a price barrier for many people who might benefit from reading it,” comments Australian OA advocate Arthur Sale. “It also fails the acid test of accountability: taxpayer-funded activities ought to be transparent and visible to all, especially where, as in the case of research grants, no national security issues or political advantage arises”

There is also frustration at ARC’s apparent lack of understanding of OA. “The reasons ARC has given for not mandating OA seem very confused,” says Steele. “It also seems to be slightly confused between the gold and green paths to open access.”

For instance, explains Steele, open access book publishing, which is more common in the humanities, has enjoyed considerable success in Australia. “Yet ARC commentators do not seem to be aware of developments here.”

Steele adds, “It is also claimed that open access could be a barrier for researchers to getting published, and could restrict early career researchers as a result. However no evidence for this has been provided.”

In fact, suggests Steele, the evidence would seem to point in the other direction, as ARC itself has acknowledged. “Professor Andrew Wells, the deputy chair of the ARC, told a National Scholarly Communications Forum on the future of the monograph held in Melbourne in September 2011 that ARC data shows top humanities researchers experience no problems in getting published in this way.”

But it is ARC’s claim that ERA has advanced the cause of OA in Australia that most frustrates OA advocates. In reality, they point out, it is quite the reverse. “It is true that the Australian government — through the Australian Scheme for Higher Education Repositories (ASHER) program — provided funding for repositories to enable collection of data about scholarly output for the ERA program,” says Steele. “However, this funding did not specify that it be used for open access dissemination of research, and many universities used the funding for establishing ‘an enabling environment’ for reporting.”

The result was that, rather than leading to more research papers being made OA, ERA encouraged the creation of dark archives in which the content is used exclusively for internal reporting purposes invisible to the outside world. “While all Australian universities have institutional repositories partially funded by the ARC, most of them have dark contents,” says Sale.

Kingsley highlighted this problem in a paper she gave in Berlin last September. Citing surveys undertaken by the CAUL Australasian Institutional Repository Support Service (CAIRSS), Kingsley uncovered a worrying trend: “The CAIRSS Repository Managers Survey over the past three years (2009-2011) shows that the ‘percentage of material in repositories that is open access’ across Australian universities has fluctuated. It started strongly with 44% in 2009, dropped to 33% in 2010 and rose back up to 37% in 2011 (CAIRSS, 2011).”

Danny Kingsley

She concluded, “While the preparations for ERA mean that all universities have a repository, ERA appears to be detrimental to the promotion of open access in Australia. It is no coincidence that the first round of ERA happened in 2010, which correlated with a drop in the number of open access items in repositories in that year.”

In retrospect, this is unsurprising. “University libraries in Australia are under-resourced, and many universities have a cross-over of repository and reporting staff, so the focus of these people was, by necessity, on complying with ERA reporting rather than open access during 2010,” explained Kingsley. “One Australian university (in personal correspondence) commented that their university repository held approximately 50% of all the preprints of work at the institution, but since the ERA reporting process had begun very few had been deposited.”

Erroneous

In short, ARC’s claim that its funding of institutional repositories has advanced the cause of OA appears to be erroneous.

Moreover, by failing to join with the NHMRC and impose an OA mandate, suggests Sale, ARC has done the Australian research community a disservice. “As Australia has just two research councils, the universities have been waiting to hear a parallel announcement from the Australian Research Council (ARC),” he says. “However, there has been total silence. This is astonishing, as the universities are entitled to expect the two research councils to have the same policy, so as to simplify the university administration of grants.”

What we learn from this perhaps is that successful OA strategies require a deeper understanding of the issues than ARC has demonstrated. We also learn that promoting OA half-heartedly or trying to combine it with other tasks (e.g. internal reporting) may have the opposite of the desired effect.  

This too is unsurprising. The history of OA is littered with stories of well-intentioned stakeholders consistently misunderstanding OA, and how best to achieve it. It does not help that many of the actors in the scholarly communication process have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, while others are fearful of possible unintended consequences, or simply prefer to avoid doing anything that could prove difficult or controversial, or that might incur additional expense — regardless of the many benefits provided by OA.

“The ARC is not in a position to monitor researcher compliance should open access be mandated,” I was told by the ARC spokesperson, “nor could the ARC fund publishing costs above the two per cent of total non-salary funding provided under ARC funding rules to support the publication and dissemination of project outputs.”

Here some OA advocates would point out that providing money for researchers to publish in gold journals is in any case a misdirection of scarce resources. Besides, they might add, most researchers prefer to spend their grant money doing research, not paying publishers to disseminate it. “The 2% funding is welcome but one wonders how many researchers will remember or want to use the current underfunding of the majority of the grants,” says Steele.

It also turns out that the 2% allowance is not what it seems, and ARC has been accused of “moved backwards” on its commitment here.

In short, argue Green OA advocates, throwing more money at publishers, rather than mandating researchers to self-archive, is a counter-productive activity, and in the long run can only feed the anger that the RWA controversy uncovered — anger, that is, at the way in which publishers like Elsevier appear to be growing rich at the expense of the research community. This, after all, appears to have been the primary motivation for the Elsevier boycott. As the boycott site puts it, “They [Elsevier] charge exorbitantly high prices for subscriptions to individual journals.”

What those pledging to boycott the publisher incorrectly assume, however, is that Elsevier is the only culprit. They also fail to see that OA publishing looks set to prove just as expensive as subscription publishing. As such, it will not solve the underlying affordability problem that has the research community so tightly in its grip.

Acute shortage of local champions

Achieving OA in Australia, suggests Steele, is proving difficult because there is an acute shortage of local champions. “No vice chancellor since the retirement of ANU’s Professor Ian Chubb — now Australia’s Chief Scientist — has come out to support public funding, public access, or public knowledge.”

In addition, he adds, “There is no equivalent in Australia of the UK JISC and the US ARL SPARC to promote open access over and above the individual universities. While the Australian government has espoused open access to government information, the relevant department — Department of Industry, Innovation, Science, Research and Tertiary Education — has not been significantly engaged in this policy area.”

Sadly, the frustrations experienced by OA advocates in Australia are not unique. Inertia, foot-dragging, sabotage, misunderstanding, confusion, and misdirected anger remain widespread everywhere. It is for this reason that, some 20 years after OA advocate Steven Harnad posted his Subversive Proposal calling on researchers to make all their papers freely available online by self-archiving them, still so few papers are being made OA today. Had Harnad’s call been heeded, universal OA could have been achieved many years ago.

In short, history suggests that the struggle for OA has to be viewed as a brick-by-brick process. Moreover, even after a brick has been laid it may subsequently be ripped out, or prove too friable to hold. Consequently, successful OA advocates require both huge patience and persistence.

We should not doubt that OA is inevitable. The danger is that if the research community throws money at OA journals, while allowing Green OA to be subverted and held back, it will discover that publishers increasingly adopt Gold OA, but price it at a level that simply protects their current income. This will see the affordability problem at the heart of the crisis in scholarly publishing simply relocated to the new OA environment.

Green OA, by contrast, holds out the hope of forcing publishers to downsize their operations to the provision of basic peer review services alone, and reduce their prices accordingly.

This is a topic I have explored elsewhere, where I suggested that one way of viewing the current situation is as a race between Gold OA and Green OA. As I put it, “If Green OA wins the race, the research community can hope to finally free itself of both the access and affordability burdens that have for so long dogged it, and publishers will be forced to give up some of their profits. The research community will have won the war.  However, if Gold OA wins the research community will have freed itself of the access burden, but failed to free itself of the affordability burden. Publishers will have won the war.”

It is for this reason, of course, that publishers are rushing to embrace Gold OA, while becoming more and more antagonistic towards Green OA. And it is for this reason that the announcement that NHMRC is introducing an NIH-style mandate is good news, while ARC’s dilatoriness is bad news.

Meanwhile, back in the Northern Hemisphere, Research Council’s UK is planning to insert a strong new brick into the Green OA infrastructure — in the shape of an upgraded OA policy. Amongst other things, this will reduce the time publishers are permitted to hold papers captive behind paywalls. As the Enabling Open Scholarship web site puts it, “the Research Councils will no longer accept embargo periods imposed by publishers, but instead stipulate an embargo period of no more than 6 months except in the case of humanities and social science.”

Brick by brick.

Illustrator Clipart

Journal Entry

I hope that the Cardinals pick up Peyton Manning. Right now it looks like it will be the Broncos but if the Cards get him that would be a really great matchup for Fitzgerald. And most likely were ever Manning goes Reggie Wayne and Dallas Clark will follow. If the Cards picked up all three that would be one of the best offenses in the NFL. I hope that they decide to bet some money put together to get those three players in to the Cardinals organization.

What would the perfect classroom have in it?

The perfect classroom would have various items to help teach different material to students. It would have laptops for all the students to take notes on. No paper or pencils would be used. The laptops would be wirelessly hooked up to the smartboard for students to answer questions that the teacher puts up on the smartboard. All the desks would have huge padded chairs for the students so tat way they are comfortable. In my opinion that is what the perfect classroom would have in it.

Journal Entry

Yesterday was pretty fun. After school everyone on the bowling team went out to the bowling alley and had a party. It was fun just chillen and bowling with them for fun without the pressure of winning a competition. I hope that you change my grade because I know I did better than an F on the perspective drawing. I can't wait for next week to be over for spring break. I will be going out quading for both weekends.

Why I think I should have gotten a better grade on the perspective assignment!

I think I deserved better than an F. I think I should have gotten at least a B. I demonstraed that I know how to draw, using illustrator, in perspective. I proved that I know how to  draw on the different planes. I also demonstrated that I know how to adjust the perspective to give a different view of the perspective. I proved that I know how to move beween the two planes and make different things on them. My perspective project proved that I was able to do everything that the tutorial showed us. I was able to take the shape tool and make the shapes be drawn in the perspective plane that I wanted them to be drawn in. Everything that I made was in the correct perspective. That is why I think I deserve better than an F on the perspective project. Sure it wasn't the most creative thing I could have made but I proved That I know what I was doing.

What is the last book I read for fun?

I haven't read a book for fun in a while. I usually only read books when I have to for class. Right now I'm reading The Hunger Games for a project in Mrs. Allens class. It is about a country in the future that is divided into districts. Each district has to send a boy and a girl to fight to the death in the hunger games. That is what the book is about. I don't really lke to read books for fun.

What type of fast food do I eat the most?

I don't really like to east fast food but I would probably say that it is panda express. Whenever I am at the mall that it what I always get. Panda has pretty good chinese food. I don't like McDonalds and all those places. That is the fast fod that I eat the most.

Summary

This article was about the miss use of performance supplements. The researcher stated that "90% of athletes who used these supplements were using them in correctly". These supplements include energy drinks, vitamins, minerals and protein supplements. Frechette said that "most of the consumers who take these already had a proficient amount of them in their system". He stated that the athletes who used them had no idea of some of the ingredients in them. The consumers who use those supplements had enough supplements in them already, they exceeded the normal amount needed. that is what the supplements article was about.

Journal Entry

Yesterday was a pretty good day. I chilled at my house for a while. Later on I went to run some errands for my parents. I also got to chill with one of my friends. Today should be awesome. After school I'm going out to the desert to go shooting. I am also going quading while I'm out there.

Scholarly Publishing: Where is Plan B?

To the intense joy of Open Access (OA) advocates, Elsevier announced Monday that it has withdrawn its support for the controversial US Research Works Act (RWA). Shortly afterwards, it was reported that the two sponsors of the bill — Representatives Darrell Issa (R-CA) and Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) — would not be “taking legislative action” on the RWA. In short, the bill is now dead on its feet.

One person who took particular note of the news was Claudio Aspesi, a senior research analyst at the sell-side research firm Sanford Bernstein. Aspesi tracks Elsevier for investors, so on Tuesday he published a new report on the company. While welcoming Elsevier's decision, Aspesi concluded, “Consensus is still treating Elsevier’s problems as cyclical, in spite of the rising evidence the issues are deeper”. So when I received a copy of the report I took it as a sign that it was time to re-interview Aspesi. The interview follows my own thoughts on the current situation below.

Claudio Aspesi

The RWA was introduced into the House of Representatives at the end of last year. Had it become law, the bill would have reversed the 2005 National Institutes of Health Public Access Policy requiring that taxpayer-funded research is made freely accessible online within 12 months of publication. It would also have prevented other federal agencies from imposing similar requirements on their funded researchers.

In short, the RWA would have been a serious setback for the OA movement. But the danger has been averted.

Sadly for Elsevier, however, its flirtation with the RWA appears to have wreaked havoc on its relationship with the research community. The blogosphere has been alive with criticism of the publisher, several petitions were launched to stop the bill and, most damagingly, in January a blog post by highly regarded Cambridge University mathematician Timothy Gowers sparked a boycott of the company, with thousands of researchers pledging that henceforth they will not publish in, or referee and/or perform editorial services for any Elsevier journals.

It is important to note, however, that this anger was not just over Elsevier’s support for the RWA. It was soon apparent that researchers have a number of historic grievances against the company, grievances that were reawakened by its support for the bill.

The boycott site (Cost of Knowledge) lists a number of these grievances, including the complaint that Elsevier charges “exorbitantly high prices” and that it has used the Big Deal (aka journal bundling) as a way of forcing librarians to “agree to buy very large ‘bundles’” of journals, including “many journals that those libraries do not actually want.”

As such, the danger is that having opened Pandora’s Box, Elsevier may not be able to close it again, and its retreat from the RWA may fail to stem the tide of researchers joining the boycott. At the time of writing, the number who had pledged to shun the publisher had grown to 7,690, and continues to grow by the hour.

Given the PR crisis it sparked, and the embarrassing climb-down that Elsevier has had to make, one is bound to wonder why the publisher ever supported the RWA in the first place.

Ask Elsevier why and it will tell you that self-archiving mandates like the NIH policy represent an unfair threat to its business — by depriving it of vital subscription revenue it needs to fund the publishing of research papers. It also claims that the NIH policy amounts to unwarranted government interference in the market.

But is it true that self-archiving mandates inevitably cause libraries to cancel subscriptions, as Elsevier claims? This is far from self-evident.

Chasing shadows?

What we do know is that a 2006 study by the Publishing Research Consortium (PRC) — of which Elsevier is a senior member — reported that 44% of librarians indicated they would cancel journal subscriptions if more than 40% of the content became freely available within 12 months of publication.

We also know that in its submission to the consultation on public access organised by the US Office of Science & Technology (OSTP), Elsevier claimed that the NIH policy is already having a negative impact on publishers’ revenues. However, no figures have yet been produced to demonstrate as much. When I asked Elsevier’s director of universal access Alicia Wise recently for evidence, she replied, “[W]e are currently evaluating the best way to disseminate these results.”

We further know that a recent report published by the Committee for Economic Development concluded that there is no compelling evidence that public access mandates impact on subscriptions. “Although there have been cancellations, including some notable cancellations of ‘Big Deal’ bundles by major research libraries,” the report states, “there have not been widespread cancellations — certainly not in the 40 per cent range described in the PRC study.”

The report adds, “[I]f the critics are correct, some negative impact should be discernible — some shadow should be visible over the subscription-supported publishing sector.”

The truth, insist OA advocates, is that there is no shadow.

What is clear, however, is that if Elsevier is correct when it says that mandates are a threat to its revenues then that threat could soon become much greater — for as the RWA sinks beneath the waves a new bill called the Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) has set sail on the legislative waters.

Introduced in both the House of Representatives and the Senate in February, rather than outlawing the NIH policy, the FRPAA would propagate it — to all federal agencies with an annual research budget of $100 million or more (around a dozen). In addition, it would reduce the embargo period from 12 months to six months. 

Conflicting demands

As it happens, observers do not expect the FRPAA to be any more successful than the RWA, certainly in the short term.

Nevertheless, argue OA advocates, open access to publicly funded research is inevitable, and last year’s America COMPETES Reauthorization Act will likely make this happen sooner rather than later. 

Section 103 of the Act, reports Heather Joseph, executive director of OA advocacy group SPARC, directed the OSTP to convene an Interagency Working Group to develop recommendations on science agency public access policies for both data and articles. “The provision required the Working Group to submit these recommendations to Congress in the form of reports,” says Joseph.

It was Elsevier’s submission to this process that we referred to earlier, and the results of the consultation have already been considered by the Working Group, says Joseph. “I understand that the reports have been drafted, and are currently under review by the agencies who participated in the Working Group.”

We cannot yet know the outcome of this, but OA advocates express quiet confidence.

At the same time, however they also draw attention to the fact that, even as it stepped away from the RWA, Elsevier took the opportunity to take another pot shot at mandates. “While we continue to oppose government mandates in this area,” its statement reads, “Elsevier is withdrawing support for the Research Work Act itself.”

What this clearly demonstrates, suggest OA advocates is that the battle is far from over.

Elsevier’s problem, of course, is that as a public company it finds itself caught between the conflicting demands of its shareholders — who expect revenues to grow constantly and maximally — and its customers, who maintain that it is overcharging for its services, and who believe that in a networked world access to publicly-funded research should be possible without the need to negotiate pay walls.

The trouble is that for so long as the debate is framed in terms of a battle between greedy publishers and noble open access activists the underlying problem remains obscured.

What is the underlying problem? Simply that the research community can no longer afford to pay the costs of publishing its research in the traditional manner. While OA may change the way in which research papers are distributed (whether by means of publishing in a subscription journal and then self-archiving a copy on the Web, or by paying to publish in an OA journal), it does not change the fundamental publishing model, including the utilisation of the costly process of pre-publication peer review.

This suggests that even if there is no evidence that mandates are causing mass cancellation today, cancellations seem inevitable in the long term if nothing changes. However, these cancellations would likely not be a consequence of self-archiving, but of the mismatch between falling university budgets and the rising number of papers researchers want to publish. The latter figure is growing at around 6% to 7% per annum, and shows no signs of falling off.

As things stand, therefore, sooner or later a train wreck could occur. After all, if the cash-strapped research community found it had no choice but to cancel more and more subscriptions, journals would eventually have to be closed, leaving fewer outlets for researchers to publish. One has to ask what value self-archiving mandates would have if researchers couldn’t get published in the first place. While they could choose to publish in OA journals instead, it is far from clear that this would be any more likely to solve the underlying affordability problem, as I suggest below.

Not just a problem for Elsevier

Claudio Aspesi has been drawing attention to this underlying problem for a number of years. As he put it to me last year, the scholarly journal system is being buffeted by three overlapping trends: “a long term unsustainable trend, a cyclical funding crisis and a more tough minded and analytical community of librarians.”

If Aspesi is correct, then even if the cyclical funding crisis were to go away tomorrow, and librarians became pussycats overnight, the long-term unsustainable trend would continue to pose a significant threat to Elsevier, as it would to all scholarly journal publishers, and indeed to the research community itself. The problem is the research community appears not to be focused on this deeper problem.

Two years ago Aspesi told me to me that Elsevier appears to be "in denial on the magnitude of the issue potentially affecting scientific publishing.” As a consequence, he added, it appears to have no “Plan B” should it find itself confronted by a long period of flat revenues, as Aspesi believes it will.

Aspesi has continued to alert the world to the impending crisis he anticipates through his periodic investment reports, and the day after Elsevier announced that it was no longer supporting the RWA he published a new report. “This is the right decision in our view, and we commend Reed Elsevier for avoiding stubbornly supporting a self-defeating course of action,” he wrote, “although action could and should have been taken sooner.”

Nevertheless, he added, “Consensus is still treating Elsevier's problems as cyclical, in spite of the rising evidence the issues are deeper.”

Could it be that the RWA was Plan B for Elsevier — based on the mistaken belief that the OA tide could be held back by legislative measures? If it was, then we must assume that the publisher’s strategy is now in tatters.

Curious to get Aspesi’s latest thinking on these matters I invited him to do another interview (see below).

Readers must draw their own conclusions, but for me the take-home point is that this is not just a problem for Elsevier, or even a problem for commercial scholarly publishers at large. It is a problem confronting the research community too. And the suspicion must be that the research community is itself in denial about it.

I say this because the evidence suggests that even if Elsevier were to announce tomorrow that it plans to make all its journals OA, the underlying problem would not go away.

After all, we have learned over the past few years that even well-intentioned non-profit OA publishers like the Public Library of Science (PLoS) appear unable or unwilling to solve the affordability problem. Yet the research community appears to have concluded that OA publishing is the answer to all its problems.

It is hard not to conclude, therefore, that the research community itself has no Plan B, and there is consequently no Plan B for scholarly publishing.

 

The interview begins …

RP: On Monday Elsevier announced that it was withdrawing its support for the US Research Works Act (RWA). In an investment report you published the next day you said, “This is the right decision in our view, and we commend Reed Elsevier for avoiding stubbornly supporting a self-defeating course of action”. What in your view went wrong here? Would it be fair to conclude that Elsevier shot itself in the foot?

CA: It is difficult to understand how Elsevier picked the course it chose. Most people I speak to think that public mandates are an irritant, but not a mortal threat to the major STM publishers, and the decision to support the RWA was bound to raise heckles.

Elsevier argues it opposes rigid mandates, but rigidity is a word many people in the academic community would easily associate with Elsevier.

RP: As I understand it, Elsevier supported the RWA because it believes that self-archiving mandates like the one introduced in 2005 by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) threaten to unfairly damage its business. As its submission to the OSTP puts it, “Early indications show that the NIH Public Access Policy has had a negative impact on Elsevier and other publishers.” I am not aware that any figures have been published to demonstrate this, but what is your view: does the NIH mandate pose a financial risk to scholarly publishers?

CA: I find it somewhat difficult to believe that any academic or research library has cancelled a single subscription to a medical or life sciences journal because it would be able to access, twelve months later, a relatively modest percentage of the articles published in any one issue of that journal. To argue otherwise invites disbelief and cynicism.

It may be true that, at the margin, some articles which would have been sold as an individual download were not downloaded, but — once again — to argue that this makes a material difference to Elsevier's revenues or profits can only irritate and antagonize even more the academic community. I am always happy to learn where I make mistakes and improve my analysis, and would be delighted if Elsevier produced evidence to disprove my scepticism.

In general, Elsevier could easily prove that the supporters of the NIH policy are wrong by producing figures and opening up to scrutiny the “early indications”. I have no doubt that many highly intelligent people in the academic community would vet the evidence and come to a fair conclusion on whether the facts support the claim.

After all, if Elsevier and the other publishers demand or oppose changes in public policy, they should provide factual evidence that they will be harmed.

RP: You have over the last few years repeatedly said that Elsevier is “in denial” about the challenge its scholarly journal business faces, and that you do not see any “Plan B”. Perhaps Plan B was the RWA. If so, now that the bill is dead in the water, where does Elsevier go from here, and what lesson should it learn from the last couple of months?

CA: If the RWA was Elsevier's plan B, then they need to think harder about their plans.

I believe their plan B is actually to try to shift spending decisions away from academic libraries and into research labs and departments. When the company held at the end of 2011 an investor day in London focusing on Elsevier, they had a grand total of one slide mentioning (in passing) academic libraries, which probably still account for 40 to 50% of their revenues.

In the normal course of events, one would expect management to spend a great deal of time discussing their larger customers, but the company has been talking virtually exclusively about the broader scientific community.

Whether this strategy works or not is a function of several factors: how fast will the research community embrace new tools, and how much pressure will library budgets put on revenues and profits in the meanwhile.

Also, academics have been largely insulated from the price points of academic journals by the fact that libraries were disbursing the funds. I am not sure whether academic and research staffs will view with equanimity the prices practiced by the leading publishers.

It is worthwhile observing that Elsevier is not the only company which will have to deal with these issues, but as the largest one, and as a division of a public company, it will be most vulnerable to any issues in this transitional phase. 

Occupy Elsevier

RP: I note that the number of researchers signing on to the boycott against Elsevier is still growing, despite the company’s withdrawal of support for the RWA. Currently it stands at over 7,500. Is it possible that “Occupy Elsevier” (as you called it in a recent report) might have gained a momentum of its own? If so, what more can Elsevier do to placate the research community?

CA: I very much doubt Elsevier can do much else. We argued back at the beginning of February that the company should abandon the RWA, but it cannot and will not abandon its price points and its commercial practices until events force it to.

The company probably hopes the boycott dies down, and ultimately it can still weather it if the only negative consequence is a somewhat smaller pool of articles submitted for publication and a smaller pool of people willing to participate in peer review.

What would change that is a visible number of editorial board resignations. This would paralyze journals, and — if it proved impossible to replace the people leaving — could lead to shut downs.

Even if the number of journals initially affected was small, the news would have a profound impact on the company. The stock market is a powerful mechanism to discount the future value of even small events, and if investors started to abandon the stock, the company would have to rethink its approach.

RP: We should also note, however, that eleven years ago a similar boycott was proposed, and 34,000 researchers committed to have no further dealings with any publisher that did not make the papers it published OA within 12 months of publication. In the event, most publishers ignored the threat, and most of the scientists who signed the pledge carried on as before. It also appears that some of the signatures on the Cost of Knowledge site are not genuine — I believe someone added your name to the boycott for instance. How serious a threat do you think the boycott poses?

CA: As I mentioned earlier, much depends on editorial board participation. Some academics are becoming increasingly sophisticated about the role the stock market can play. Whether it will or not largely depends on the academic community itself.

A word on the signatures: I doubt that many are illegitimate. When I discovered (by chance) that my name had been added, I made sure that it was removed and documented the event. There is no way for sure what went through the mind of the person who did this, but I doubt it was done to help the boycott.

I don't like to make myself central to all of this, because I am not. The fact that someone went through the motions of adding my name, however, shows that they are taking this very seriously, to the point of doing something that they must know is wrong. 

Makes no sense

RP: Last March you said that a “crunch point” had been reached for scholarly journal publishers, and you predicted the demise of the Big Deal (aka journal bundling). Your reasoning was that there are three overlapping trends: a long-term unsustainable trend, a cyclical funding crisis and a more tough minded and analytical community of librarians. Is that still your view? Have you adjusted your analysis in any way?

CA: Largely speaking, I still think the system for academic dissemination that has emerged once distribution became digital makes no sense.

There are questions around timing, because the long (and lengthening) duration of contracts means that libraries get a chance to rethink their relationship with each individual publisher only two or three times in a decade. What could change all of this is mass resignation from editorial boards, leading to the effective suspension of tens or hundreds of publications.

Elsevier has made the commercial terms of their contracts very opaque, so it is unclear what recourse libraries have. I doubt, however, the contracts would hold if libraries demanded massive discounts in the wake of Elsevier stopping publishing a third or half of its journals (or even a smaller number, if these were the leading journals in their respective disciplines).

RP: In discussing the Big Deal with me last year you cited the stand that was then being taken by Research Libraries UK (RLUK), which was insisting that it would not sign a new Big Deal with Elsevier and Wiley-Blackwell unless the subscription costs were reduced by 15%. There were a number of other demands too. It is my understanding that RLUK did not get all it asked for, but signed another Big Deal anyway. Are you still predicting the death of large bundled journal contracts?

CA: Librarians still like the Big Deals. So, if Elsevier was willing to work within the confines of what libraries can afford, both by moderating annual revenue growth to 1 to 2% and in some cases re-adjusting prices when the libraries cannot meet current levels of spending, I think Big Deals could survive for a long time.

Elsevier would have to work much harder at extracting efficiencies within its own processes. This would allow them to both pass along some of the efficiencies to its customers by permanently moderating “price” inflation and continue to expand their own margins.

RP: What clearly annoys the research community is that it believes Elsevier charges too much, and so earns excessive profits. There seems to be some confusion as to exactly what these profits are. OA advocates tend to cite figures anywhere between 25% and 40%. I realise that analysts calculate these figures differently, but what figure do you cite, how has that figure changed over the last ten years or so, and how does it compare with other industries?

CA: The best way to look at this is the Adjusted Operating Profit of Elsevier itself, which was 35.7% in 2011. Of course, within Elsevier there are many businesses, and all have different profitability, but it is impossible to really know from the outside.

RP: Last year you were predicting 2% growth for Elsevier in 2013 (where other analysts were predicting twice that). Is that still your forecast? Presumably it implies lower profits for the company? If your estimate is right, how do you see it impacting on Elsevier’s profits over the next few years?

CA: My understanding is that one year ago other analysts were also predicting growth in 2012 to reach 3.7%, and have now taken their numbers down to 2%. I think that we will continue to see growth average around 2% and profits stabilize around the current level. 

What is Elsevier to do?

RP: The RWA is dead, but there is another bill in play that will doubtless prolong the mandate controversy. The Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) would propagate the NIH mandate to other federal agencies, and it would reduce the embargo period required before a paper is made freely available from 12 months to six months. Presumably this poses a new (and greater) threat to Elsevier. But how great a threat?

CA: As I said at the beginning, I doubt even one subscription was cancelled because of the NIH policy. Even extending the policy to all research funded by the Federal Government would only affect 60% or so of US research at most, which translates into a bit less than 15% of global research.

Even allowing for the disproportionately high impact factor of US research (which is about 50% higher than average), I have a hard time envisioning cancellations of leading journals because 1 or 2 articles out of 10 will be freely available in six months.

On the other hand, a US public mandate may be the tipping point which leads many other countries to follow, and then incentives for librarians to cancel subscriptions would mount. Also, public mandates may not affect leading journals, but most publishers have journals with lower impact factors and low readership numbers.

The risk is that libraries would want to pay even less for those journals and push back on the pricing of collections and Big Deals would rise.

RP: So what is Elsevier to do? One obvious move would seem to be to migrate its 2,000 plus subscription journals to an open access model as quickly as possible. When I suggested this to you in June 2010, however, you replied, “I doubt that shifting to supporting OA would work for them, since they would probably insist on maintaining or increasing profits to do so. In a challenging funding environment, I am not sure that any OA model that Elsevier could support would meet the funding issues of the academic world.” Is that still your view?

CA: I have not changed my mind. The risks involved in transitioning to a completely different business model are high, and there is little incentive for most management teams to do so unless an external catastrophic event pushes them in that direction.

RP: You also suggested that the company should undergo a “progressive divestiture”. Is that still your view? If it did, could it hope to benefit to the same degree as it would have done then? I think you estimated a 15/20% upside to the share price at that time.

CA: The upside changes all the time with both the share price of the company and the expected value of a divestiture. At present the upside is still in that region.

RP: I am wondering if perhaps one consequence of the RWA fiasco is that the debate is now moving on from a discussion about the relative merits of subscription versus open access publishing, to a discussion about how researchers can take responsibility for disseminating their research themselves — by means, for instance, of arXiv-like services. This seems to be the thrust of much of the debate on the Math2.0 site. Elsewhere, one-time Elsevier employee Jan Velterop has argued that if the research community were to move to an “endorsement” model like that used by arXiv it could save $3 billion a year in publication costs. Since this would involve abandoning pre-publication peer review it might suggest that scholarly publishers face not just lower profits, but redundancy. Do you have any views on the likelihood of that?

CA: I doubt the academic community is — by and large — ready to abandon peer review. If this happened, of course, then the role of journals would be further diminished, but I would not expect that to happen any time soon.

I find interesting hybrid models like SCOAP³, which preserve peer review but use repositories for dissemination. The experience of SCOAP³, however, is that even small and tightly knit communities can take years to coalesce around alternative models. Doing so for larger communities may prove impossible.

RP: How do you see the OA debate, and Elsevier’s role within that debate, playing out over the next 12 to 18 months?

CA: Much depends on the academic community itself. If someone emerges as a charismatic leader, actively working to leverage pressure points, such as politicians, opinion makers, and their own colleagues sitting in academic boards, we could see an acceleration of change. Or this could all end up in making no difference.

RP: Thank you for taking the time to speak with me.

Aspesi’s latest report on Elsevier can be downloaded here.