Help Wanted: Supplier Services and Sustainable Funding Incentives for OA Monographs

By Rachel Fox Von Swearingen (Collections Lead Librarian, Syracuse University Libraries) <rsfoxvon@syr.edu>

Publishers, vendors, and libraries exist in a commercial ecosystem of mutual benefit. From the library perspective, publishers create information products, vendors make library workflows scalable, and libraries provide significant funding. Robust vendor services from both publishers and suppliers have adapted to simultaneously serve both print and paywalled electronic monograph collection development. A monograph is a monograph, no matter how (or whether) a library pays for it, and our collection development evaluation process and metadata supply needs do not change for an open access title. However, the tumultuous rearrangement of the funding ecosystem to accommodate open access (OA) monographs has affected the services provided to us by our vendor partners. As a result, libraries are experiencing significant service gaps and a proliferation of disparate sales models, impeding our ability to collect titles and sustainably participate monetarily in the ecosystem.

These struggles from the library side are a labor supply issue. Library staff lines have slowly been transitioned from collections and technical services to other services like digital scholarship, research impact support, and digital preservation due to changes in the collecting landscape and outsourcing to vendor services. OA monograph collecting is not currently serviced well through our vendors, but it is difficult to craft an administratively justifiable proposal to transition library staff lines back to fill a gap previously met by vendors. Libraries are partners with other members of the open access publishing ecosystem, and we can understand why the gaps exist, but libraries unfortunately cannot simply move to fill those gaps with our own labor.

Collecting OA monographs requires manual workflows, and those are still in flux and development at my institution. Understanding “push” and “pull” when it comes to the labor involved is important. For example, detailed approval plans, standing orders, and notification services push title discovery our way with relatively low labor on the library end once everything is set up. Our technical staff then load a tidy batch of precurated and precleaned final records into our catalog. Outside of that, we monitor news, email, and websites for discovery and pull titles and catalog metadata to us. Our subject selectors do have some monograph types for which we utilize the title-by-title pull method, such as maps, music scores, video titles, or art publications. If a library pulls records from an open metadata repository, they must still have the in-house expertise to query the API and then clean the records before loading. This pull workflow at the scale we are headed toward for OA monographs is not possible.

Our first early steps for collecting OA monographs have relied on our existing monograph workflows for title requests. Then, those individual title requests become package selections where we acquire metadata from our electronic resource management system (ERM) services, which are powered by a knowledge base. Historically, if a requested title isn’t in our ERM, we have not added it. Title requests to date have been from a few history faculty, from our subject librarians, and a few I have selected. Our faculty cited their desire for their students to encounter all course readings side-by-side with their paywalled counterparts within library systems. Because package-level or publisher-level collecting falls into the duties of interdisciplinary collection development librarians like me, our subject selectors have not been able to dedicate the time to regularly collect OA titles for their individual subject areas. The titles don’t appear within our supplier workflows, nor within their subject-specific discovery sources, so relying on their labor isn’t a viable solution.

Package-level discovery, and incorporating its metadata into our systems, typically occurs in our ERM. ERMs are not designed for collection development discovery, so this already disadvantages OA content. Cambridge University librarians Jayne Kelly and Clara Panozzo (2021) review many of the difficulties they have encountered with this process in their Open Access Books Network blog post “Open Access books and [in]discoverability: a library perspective.” They describe vendor degradation of publishersupplied metadata, duplication among collections, unclear OA or paywalled status, disjointed workflows to accommodate dozens of different publisher pulling cycles, broken links, and other gaps. Some publishers I have spoken to weren’t aware of ERMs and focused only on providing MARC records directly to libraries. Others do not submit records out of adherence to the open philosophy of not working with a for-fee vendor. If a publisher does submit metadata, the ERM vendor does not always accept it, and the reasons vary from lack of perception of library demand for the collection or inadequacies in the data itself. I have had discussions with several of my publisher sales representative colleagues on how we can get the metadata for their package into the knowledge base, and it is a very long and uncertain process. Librarians from the Council of California Community Colleges (McMillan and Flores 2021) shared their experiences researching their ERM’s process for identifying and including OA metadata collections. In their blog post “Open Access Collections in the Ex Libris Central Discovery Index,” they outline their ambitious project to curate a list of trusted OA collections that other libraries could activate within their own ERMs, and some of the under-the-hood details provided by Ex Libris. For OA monographs, and overall, we need for ERM vendors to be incentivized to participate more actively in the OA ecosystem as well.

“The potential for growth of a centralized OA monograph metadata repository is fantastic ... It does not, however, address the library need for vendor services like approval or notification profiles ... nor does it address the library labor needed to develop scripts to harvest from the repository API.”

Metadata is the foundation for our collection development process. It powers both our discovery of titles, as well as our end-user discovery in our local systems. Library perceptions, and vendor models, of how that metadata creation is paid for is a key idea to explore in how we might work together to improve our situations. Suppliers and other monograph vendors spend a great deal of up-front expense in setting up their title catalogs, cleaning metadata, profiling titles, and loading customer holdings before they even generate a customer invoice. These costs are rolled into a library supplier’s unit sales margin or another vendor’s broader fees for ERMs. If looking at invoice line items, libraries only see distinct metadata fees at the very end of the process, associated with the final delivery of metadata for our catalogs or in membership fees for cooperative cataloging services. I can imagine that libraries would balk at increasing the cost of those records, or at charging more for a record for an OA title than a paywalled title. I don’t have solutions, but I can say that I would be willing to consider other payment models to make it more sustainable for both us and our vendors.

My vendor colleagues have assuredly spent a great deal of effort working on the metadata part of the ecosystem. Difficulties with metadata delivery from publishers, as outlined by Laura Ricci’s essay in this issue of Against the Grain, severely limit our suppliers’ ability to provide consistent services for OA monographs to begin with. For example, there are difficulties navigating the uncertain OA status of a title at the time metadata for the title is released by the publisher or when the print edition is profiled on approval plans and sold to libraries. I have encountered some publishers who make the philosophical choice to distribute their metadata for free only directly to libraries or to open metadata repositories.

The potential for growth of a centralized OA monograph metadata repository is fantastic, as this solves the library issues with too many data sources. It does not, however, address the library need for vendor services like approval or notification profiles that aid in evaluation, selection, and deduplication of titles, nor does it address the library labor needed to develop scripts to harvest from the repository API. This technical hurdle, I speculate, keeps these titles out of many public and smaller institutions with no infrastructure for this work, and it is very spotty for those larger academic institutions who have limited infrastructure. A suggestion is to explore how the repositories could work with suppliers to deliver metadata to them, who in turn would service those libraries who want title-by-title information and already have notification and approval profiles set up. It is not a valid assumption for publishers to believe that all libraries will simply want to collect OA titles at the package level. Some titles may be outside of the curriculum for technical or community colleges, or otherwise out of scope for public libraries or other institutions. Much of the publisher to library collaboration I am seeing is occurring within the large academic library community who are more likely to have the resources to pull from APIs, whereas the libraries that would benefit the most from the OA movement are others who likely aren’t participating in funding OA.

Knowledge Unlatched (2022) recently announced a vendor partnership with GOBI Library Solutions to facilitate crowdfunding for their OA eBook collections. This likely solves many administrative issues for Knowledge Unlatched, allows libraries to see what has been funded and what hasn’t, and also provides a way for a supplier to generate some income from the inclusion of OA titles. From the library side, I’m excited to see the inclusion of the metadata, as it does what we need to place the open titles within our current workflows. If this is successful for our vendors, I hope to see other funding models work within supplier and vendor systems in a financially viable way for everyone.

A side question that comes up for me as a librarian is to look at how OA journals are incorporated into our system, and whether we can borrow workflows from that process. Journal publishers seem to be getting third-party subscription databases to index their content. These databases are already in our collections, so libraries are in turn passively providing discovery to our library users. If a library wishes to add OA journal titles to their journal locator or link resolver, then the process is much more manual, like collecting OA monographs. Users inevitably find the OA journal within the subscription databases and request that the library add it to their systems, so library staff are incentivized to spend collecting time adding access points to OA journals.

Record-keeping for OA monograph collection development is also a struggle for my acquisitions colleagues. Luckily, our systems and fiscal administrative policies do not pose issues for adding indexing for zero-cost items nor for contributing to OA funding initiatives. These scenarios are a huge challenge for many other institutions, however. Our initial response was to manually create a custom category for OA collections within our ERM, flagging those collections as we add the indexing to our discovery layer. Fast-forward to a few years later, we began contributing funding to OA initiatives. This has required further granularity for the variety of scenarios under which we are both funding OA initiatives and indexing OA titles. There are a) the package collection development selections we were already sporadically making, b) the “free subscription” backlist access we may receive through publisher OA funding incentives, and c) the collections that might get flipped to OA if a funding initiative is met and our incentive includes access to them anyway. My colleague Jenn Zuccaro (pers. comm., June 2022), Acquisitions Librarian at Syracuse University, offered some of her uncertainties: How can we answer questions about how much we’ve been spending on supporting OA? How do we get notified when an initiative is fully funded, how do we know what titles are flipped, and how do we match the notification to the funding we provided six months or longer ago? We do not have clear answers, and it is very dependent upon the particulars of our vendor system capabilities.

Beyond collecting OA titles, libraries have additional workflows and considerations for handling the increasing number of solicitations for OA funding requests from publishers. Early publisher solicitations for OA funding relied

primarily on appeals to our altruism, and there were a handful per year to evaluate. Fund the retrospective digitization of some content to make it OA, or fund these already published eBooks to be rehosted on an open platform. Our institution gets a nice mention in a press release, or our name listed on a website. Sometimes, we have gotten early access to content as it is digitized before the final release of the collection. I am an advocate for OA publishing, but I also recognize that we function in a capitalistic and competitive world. I have an ethical imperative to responsibly spend my institution’s finite collections funds, and our publishers and vendors have salaries and infrastructure costs to cover. We still contribute funds to programs that are essentially collecting donations, but I could foresee a future where that frequency has decreased.

Recent rounds of solicitations have increased in frequency and focused on providing funding incentives. These can look like no-cost leased access to backlists, guaranteed access to the potentially OA frontlist, or other variations. Staff time to evaluate these very disparate programs is hefty, sometimes comparable to time invested in evaluating large paywalled packages that cost 10 times more. It is also quite confusing, as we must determine what to prioritize in the decision-making process. Last fall’s Charleston Conference had a great overview and practical application of how libraries have developed and applied rubrics, titled “Evaluating and Investing in Open Access Monograph Models” (DiPasquale et al. 2021). A few of those factors included comparing the values of the publisher with a library’s institutional values, the nonprofit status of a publisher, and sustainability of the publishing model. We have not strictly developed a rubric at my institution, nor do we prohibit funding requests from for-profit publishers, but we have looked at similar factors. Our confidence in whether the funded content will be reliably preserved and hosted going forward is important. Usage statistics for prior publications are sometimes presented to us as part of the OA funding sales pitch, suggesting that prior use of titles is evidence of the effectiveness and sustainability of their publishing. For OA titles that are included in our suppliers’ systems, like Knowledge Unlatched in GOBI, I expect that the usage statistics will soar once they are discoverable in library catalogs. Usage statistics are not a major evaluative factor for me, because I am aware of the unequal discovery playing field, but it is worth noting as we see more OA content make it into our supplier catalogs. I may reconsider that factor once I am faced with more funding proposals.

Budget-wise, for specific publisher funding requests, we do evaluate what we have historically been paying for their paywalled content and reallocating those funds. The funding request, however, is regularly 50–100 percent higher than our prior budgeted expenditures for that publisher. We have planned for that, and the dollar amounts being considered are small in proportion to our overall budget, but the relative increase cannot be completely ignored when we plan for future implications. Again, we make an altruistic choice to fund it, and we do benefit by the incentives offered, but it has typically involved duplicate access to prior print purchases or to other backlist titles that we had not chosen to collect at the time of publication. As more frontlists flip to OA, the value of those backlist incentives decreases over time, so appeals on that level may not be sustainable in the future. At some point, we are defunding other monograph publishers or other parts of our budget.

I have concerns about what funding requests will look like in the future, as it appears as though the same pool of larger academic research libraries are being regularly solicited. Also, smaller publishers or those who started out as OA do not have a stock of paywalled content to provide for free to libraries as an incentive. This does not bode well on diversity for the potential OA content, as it favors the larger and well-established publishers, nor does it allow for diversity among those with the paying power in the small pool of research library funders. I find the Open Book Collective (Fathallah 2022) to be an intriguing model, where libraries can contribute a lump sum support fee, which can then be divided over several smaller publishers who likely would not sustainably be able to seek funding competitively on their own. I believe that this type of collaboration is also important in the OA ecosystem.

These collection development challenges must not stymie the OA monograph movement. In absence of supplier services or easy-to-understand and sustainable funding incentives, usage and reach of OA monographs will not make the gains we have seen with OA journals. And libraries will be neither able nor motivated to provide income to the wide variety of publishers that we do in paywalled publishing. The pool of funding providers is already limited to medium to larger academic libraries, and our budgets will only let our altruism go so far. I look to future collaborations and more education among all members of our OA monograph ecosystem, and we must all continue our advocacy and diplomacy to successfully promote our shared values.

References

DiPasquale, Emma, Sharla Lair, Rachael Samberg, and Sunshine Carter. 2021. “Evaluating and Investing in Open Access Monograph Models.” Panel presentation at the Charleston Conference, Charleston, SC, November 3, 2021.

Fathallah, Judith. 2022. “Introducing the Open Book Collective: Making the start of our outreach work.” Communityled Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs (COPIM). https://copim.pubpub.org/pub/introducing-the-open-bookcollective/release/1.

Kelly, Jayne and Clara Panozzo. 2021. “Open Access books and [in]discoverability: a library perspective.” Open Access Books Network. https://openaccessbooksnetwork.hcommons. org/2021/02/11/open-access-books-and-indiscoverability-alibrary-perspective/.

Knowledge Unlatched. 2022. “GOBI Library Solutions® from EBSCO Partners with Knowledge Unlatched to Support Open Access Initiatives in Academic Libraries.” April 25, 2022. https:// knowledgeunlatched.org/2022/04/gobi-library-solutions-fromebsco-partners-with-ku-to-support-oa-initiatives/.

McMillan, Mary and Sean A. Flores. 2021. “Open Access Collections in the Ex Libris Central Discovery Index.” CCL Outlook. https://cclibrarians.org/outlook/december-2021/ open-access-collections-ex-libris-central-discovery-index.