Interview
Tilting the balance back towards libraries
Jason Priem, of Our Research, tells of his hopes for a ‘long-overdue’ change in academic publishing
Tell us a little about your background and qualifications... I was a middle-school teacher for five years, teaching language arts, social studies and media. As a teacher, I started to realise how big an influence the Web was going to have on learning and knowledge, so I taught myself to code and dove in! I worked on an information science PhD
for four years at the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill. My work there got me interested in how social media activity might open a new window on scholarly impact, leading me to coin the word ‘altmetrics’ and co-author an ‘Altmetrics Manifesto’. As an academic, I learned about the open access and open science movements, and got really excited... I felt like I had to build something to help!
What is the history of Our Research? Heather [Piwowar, co-founder of Our Research] and I met one another when I peer-reviewed one of her papers; later we met in person as part of an open science hackathon. The hackathon ended in the evening, but we went out in the hall of the hotel and kept working all through the night. I remember being surprised when the hall started getting crowded by waiters serving breakfast the next morning! That hackathon project went on to
become Impactstory Profiles, our first big website. From there, we built Unpaywall, a free and open index of all the world’s OA articles. Many libraries asked us to build a subscription analysis tool using Unpaywall data, so we did. That became Unsub, which launched (as Unpaywall Journals) in November 2019. Now, hopefully, we still have a lot more history left to write!
16 Research Information June/July 2021
Our non-profit mission has remained the same throughout: we build tools to help further the progress of open science, because we believe research progress is more efficient and effective when it’s open.
In the UK, Jisc has just signed up to your Unsub service. Can you explain it? Certainly. Unsub is an analytic dashboard that helps academic librarians cancel their subscriptions to ‘big deals’. These ‘big deals’ bundle up thousands of toll-access journals from a single publisher into a single, massive subscription. They have become the central pillar of the entire toll-access publishing apparatus, because they are highly profitable – a single deal for a US R1 university is generally several million dollars – and libraries have increasingly felt ‘locked in’ to these deals due to a perceived lack of alternatives. The growing prevalence of open access
(OA), however, offers a solution to the captivity of libraries at the hands of these big deals. Because much of the content of the big deal is now available as OA, there is now a smoother ‘off-ramp’ to cancellation than ever before. That is, after cancellation, faculty can still access a large percentage of the relevant literature. Librarians are increasingly aware of this. However, there has been no way to
quantify the exact percentage of post- cancellation access that OA is able to provide. Although a growing number libraries have cancelled, the lack of hard numbers has made most librarians unwilling to upset the status quo. This presents a compelling opportunity
for us as OA advocates: by helping libraries quantify the alternatives to toll-access publishing, we can empower
librarians to cancel multi-million dollar big deals. This, in turn, will begin to turn off the faucet of money flowing from universities to toll-access publishing houses. In short: by helping libraries cancel big deals, we can make toll-access publishing less profitable, and accelerate the transition toward universal OA. Unsub is designed to do this. It creates
a set of forecasts, customised to a given library, that the library can use to understand the impacts of cancellation. This requires the creation of a usage model for a given scenario. The usage model incorporates library-specific data for citation, faculty authorship, campus downloads and pricing information. It also includes global data on interlibrary loan rates, OA, disciplinary readership patterns and many other factors. Libraries can copy, tune and customise this model in many ways, creating a reliable and objective plan for their future, without toll-access big deals. This post-big-deal future is generally quite a bit rosier than they expected... this, in turn, gives them the confidence to cancel.
What led you to develop the product? Well, it would be nice to say we came up with the idea because we were very clever... but I’m afraid that’s not it. In reality, libraries just kept asking us to build it, and finally we did!
As I mentioned, many libraries are under
intense and growing budget pressure (which the pandemic has not improved). And for the last 20 years, the balance of power in the relationship between libraries and publisher has tilted ever more toward the publishers. So there is a lot of demand out there for a tool like Unsub that can help tilt the balance back toward libraries.
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