Open Access

UVM Libraries are building new avenues for the free flow of information for everyone.

Story by Ed Neuert

Adrienne Miao is trying to build something, but many of the important tools she needs for successful construction are locked up out of reach. That’s speaking figuratively, but it describes a real problem— for Miao, and for countless other scholars, professionals, and other seekers of knowledge across modern society.

Miao works for UVM’s Center on Disability and Community Inclusion, where she is a community services core function coordinator and project director of the Pediatrics Professionals Collaborative of Vermont, a program that works to support the development of pediatric professionals across the state and improve health outcomes for Vermont children and families. She works with a wide network of interdisciplinary professionals, all of whom have a keen need to keep abreast of the latest research in their fields.

“We are really focused on community outreach. We’re ultimately trying to help support capacity building and systems change for educators, for occupational therapists, speech therapists, physical therapists throughout the state,” says Miao. It’s an important and necessary task; Vermont is a small state with a dearth of providers, and those here are often spread throughout the region’s most rural areas.

“We're working often in the Northeast Kingdom or other fairly remote areas. We have a lot of professionals who really want to know best practices, but it is very cost prohibitive for a lot of the community members to access cutting-edge journal publications and research,” she says.

There’s the key to the problem: ironically, in the midst of the Information Age, as the Internet enters its fourth decade as a part of daily life, vital information—the published research that appears in responsible peer-reviewed academic journals—is effectively walled-off from access by many of the people who need it most and could put it to use in countless ways to improve people’s daily lives

An Unsustainable System

The New Yorker writer and longtime newspaperman A.J. Liebling famously said, “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.” Today’s academic press—its publishing system, which has developed over many years—is structured so that a few publishers own the copyright to much of published scholarly research and charge extremely high fees for readers to access those texts—be they scholars, lay community members or, yes, even the original creators of the research.

At the University of Vermont, nearly 700 research projects were funded in the past year by government entities such as the National Institutes of Health or the National Science Foundation, plus private philanthropic support, totaling well over $260 million. “Taxpayer dollars are funding that research,” says Bryn Geffert, UVM’s dean of libraries and professor of history. “We are the recipient of 260 million dollars in largesse. And we are supposed to use that money to do good research, which we do, and get it into the hands of everybody who needs it.”

The system we've devised to do that is one where scholars obtain funding to do their work. They produce the research and then try to find a publisher. “If I'm a biologist, I try to find the most prestigious journal publisher in my field who wants my article,” explains Geffert. “If the journal accepts that article, the biologist has to sign a contract that says, ‘I am signing away all rights to this article to this commercial publisher. I no longer have rights to that research. My university, which paid me to do this research, no longer has rights to that research.’ We want access to that article. But we've signed away the rights. So what do we have to do? We have to buy the rights back. We give it away for free, we get no money in compensation. They pay us nothing, and then we buy it back. That’s a real problem.”

The system didn’t always work this way. Journals used to be smaller, independent operations, typically run by scholarly societies. Over time, Elsevier and other publishing companies began approaching these organizations to say, in effect, “Why should you have to worry yourselves with all of this work? Let us give you a big payment in exchange. We'll take over and do all of the work for you and we'll continue giving yearly payments.”

“And how do you say no to that? You're getting money and you are not having to do the work anymore,” says Geffert. But as the publishing company slowly creates a monopoly in fields, they raise the prices, and raise them again. “And there's no competition”, says Geffert. “Either you purchase that journal from Elsevier, for instance, or you don't have that journal. Nobody else publishes it. So publishers have been able to raise prices with impunity.”

Big academic publishers generated well over $3 billion in revenue in the past year, and they report extremely high profit margins, in the range of 30 to 40 percent. (For comparison, ExxonMobil’s profit margin is usually a bit above 13 percent.)

Scholarly authors have always given their research articles to journals for publishing. “But there was a reason that we used to give that material away,” says Geffert. “Because we had no good way of disseminating it. In the old print world, we couldn't publish it ourselves. We gave it to a print journal, and we were glad that they would publish it and they would sell it to us for reasonable fees.” But those reasonable fees have steadily crept up over the years, to the point where many libraries have had to cut back on book purchases to fund continued access to academic journals.

The Path To Openness

An alternate path exists and has been building momentum for the past 20 years—open-access publishing. It’s a system already in extensive use in the biomedical field, where the Public Library of Science (PLOS) publishes a dozen freely open journals. Two UVM faculty members, Gary Ward, professor of microbiology and molecular genetics, and Meredith Niles, associate professor of nutrition and food sciences and a Gund Institute fellow, have deep connections to this area of the open-access movement.

The open-access goal is simple: remove the financial barriers between peer-reviewed research and its audiences. In A.J. Liebling terms, let more people own their own press. That’s what led to the inauguration this June of the university’s own open-access academic press.

“I think of the UVM press as a ‘proof of concept,’” says Geffert. “And what we're trying to prove is that it's possible to publish literature every bit as good as what traditional presses are producing, that we can subject it to the same level of peer review, same level of developmental editing. And then once it's done, instead of locking it behind a paywall and charging people to access it, we simply post it free of charge.”

The first venture of UVM Press is the Journal of Ecological Engineering, newly created for the American Ecological Engineering Society, one of whose members, Eric Roy, assistant professor of environmental sciences in the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources and a fellow of the Gund Institute, suggested the partnership to Geffert.

Going forward, UVM Press hopes to expand to publish three other journals, each presented in the “diamond” openaccess model under which there is no cost whatsoever to the author to publish or to access the published research. The press also plans on publishing approximately 10 books a year and is currently recruiting its first book editor, whose duties will include the development of new book series that align with the two priorities of the university’s strategic plan: amplifying our impact on healthy societies and healthy environments. Also under development is a series called Janus Texts that will showcase differing views on important topics in conversation with each other.

Linking Libraries

It’s a paradox that in a world ruled by the Internet, the existence of physical books and the U.S. Postal Service work together to keep libraries connected and ensure that academic libraries will probably never give up their “brick and mortar” facilities. In a way, the genesis of this situation can be traced back to 1967, when a group of university and library administrators in Ohio created a computerized network to link academic libraries and their catalogs throughout their state. The Ohio College Library Center grew far beyond its original goal. Later renamed Online Computer Library Center, and better known as OCLC, it evolved into a kind of master catalog for virtually all academic libraries in the U.S., and increasingly in Europe too. As OCLC took shape, its staff realized that the master catalog they were building could become a very convenient way of sharing material among libraries.

“They built software around this catalog that allows you to place and track requests,” says Geffert. Nowadays, he explains, “The folks in our interlibrary loan department will come in in the morning and they will open up a screen and there will be all the requests from libraries from just down the street or across the globe. And they pull the books off the shelf and ship them off to wherever they are needed.” Similar processes exist for journal articles. And each day, packages arrive at the Howe Library with books requested by Vermonters from libraries across the nation.

Since no library can own all the books users might at some time desire, the interlibrary loan system is key to the mission of a university library. This issue was the focus of a statewide conversation in Vermont in the summer of 2022, when the soon-to-be Vermont State University announced a plan to switch to all-digital libraries across its three campuses. The plan ignited an uproar and has since been rescinded.

“I am not going to pass judgment on Vermont State because I know that they are under incredible financial pressures,” says Geffert. “But still, if one is committed to having a library, trying to go completely online is not going to save you money. In fact, it's probably going to cost you money.” This is because, contrary to popular belief, electronic books tend to be more expensive than print books.

“Publishers know that physical books wear out over time, so you will be buying replacement copies. They know that electronic books don't wear out over time, so they want to charge you more. They also argue that there can be two or three people using an electronic book at any one time, whereas only one can use a print book, and therefore they charge you more. You're probably going to end up spending more if you try to go to the all-electronic route. And because we are so committed to sharing our works with everybody else, we will not sign contracts for electronic books that we're prohibited from sharing.

“As a result, we're still buying an awful lot of print books— because you can always share a print book. Nobody can stop you from putting the book in the U.S. mail and sending it off. This is something libraries are thinking really hard about. We realize that there's a danger in replacing print books with electronic books that cannot be shared, because if we do that, our interlibrary loans are going to collapse. And every academic library in the U.S. relies on interlibrary loan. Some of the biggest, most prestigious libraries are some of the biggest borrowers.”

The Open Door

“Open access” has an even wider meaning for UVM Libraries. It starts with a broad look at the mission of academic libraries and those who work in them.

“Libraries have thought of themselves as delivering information, and then students go off and do who knows what's with it,” says Geffert. “But we're increasingly hiring people who operate as teachers. We have faculty who will call librarians into a classroom a couple of times during the semester to talk about doing a research assignment and the tools and strategies students can use. Increasingly, we're seeing librarians meet with faculty to think through the whole semester—what are the learning objectives for this course? What kinds of research skills are part of those objectives? And then what kinds of assignments can librarians help faculty develop where students will be doing that kind of research and learning those skills?”

Geffert is also working to connect UVM Libraries to CLOVER, the Collaborative Libraries of Vermont interlibrary loan system.

“We also welcome everyone into our physical libraries, no questions asked. Anybody who comes through the doors, we don't ask who you are or where you're from. If you come in, you have access to our physical book collections, our physical journal collections, and you also have access to all our electronic databases.” And all Vermont residents can have a UVM library card.

Novelist and essayist David Carkeet, who lives and writes in Worcester, Vt., is one of those Vermonters taking advantage of that access. “Many of my novels rely heavily on research,” he says. “I've wandered the stacks [at UVM] since we moved here in 2003. I wrote a piece on Mark Twain, the Mississippi, and slavery for Smithsonian and relied on the library collection for books on Twain's life, river geology, steamboating, and slavery.” Carkeet says he’s done so much research in this vein at UVM that “I could probably walk blindfolded to the Twain call number row…. The UVM library has been fabulous for me.”