librarypunk - 007 - Transmorpher Agreements

Episode Date: April 4, 2021

CONTENT WARNING: We briefly mention events at Charlottesville during Unite the Right.  We are joined by Dave @saggiotipo to talk about so-called transformative agreements. What are they? How to they affect everything in the library? We get into the specifics of the University of California deal (as far as we have them).  Read Dave’s musings prior to the UC announcement here: https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:35125/ Ginny Steel criticism in 2016: https://www.library.ucla.edu/sites/default/files/Ginny-Steel_open-letter_OA2020-PIF_October-2016_0.pdf  Full UC MOU with Elsevier here: https://ucsf.app.box.com/s/gb2zj4dmk3h11p4munjvt9gsvtxr84qw  And UC’s description of their deal: https://osc.universityofcalifornia.edu/uc-publisher-relationships/elsevier-oa-agreement/#basics  We also answer a superfan’s question! So keep writing in on Twitter @librarypunk.

Welcome to Library Punk, where it's always horny summer 2021. Okay, welcome. My name is Justin. I'm scholarly communications librarian. My pronouns are he and him. I'm Sadie. I am an IT administrator at a public library. My pronouns are she, they.

I am Jay. I'm a metadata and discovery librarian and an academic library. Me laughing woke up my cat, so I expect apologies for making me laugh. And my pronouns are he or they. I'm Carrie. I'm an academic health sciences librarian, and my pronouns are she her. And we have a guest. What's good, everyone? Thanks for having me on the podcast. I'm Dave. I'm an academic librarian in Virginia, and I use a he-him pronouns. Yeah. A friend of the pod. Welcome to the pod. Being on the pod. Glad to have you on the pod.

I'm really trying to get into podcasting lingo. So just calling everyone. If you just repeat pod enough times? Yeah, I'm just calling everyone friend of the pod. It's like friend of the pod. What are our uploads? What are our stats? Welcome my mom, friend of the pod. Everybody listening needs to like, subscribe, give it a five-star review.

Yeah. Don't forget to ring the bell so you get to notifications. Rate us on iTunes. Tell your friends. Maybe we'll get sponsored by some socks. Socks and or mattresses or snacks. I need a new mattress. Yeah. Oh, actually really, I want snacks. That's the thing I want snacks.

Yeah, I chill for snacks. Yeah, I will flash deuce whatever's for snacks. What for snacks? WhatEvers. Oh. I said flash deuce. I said, I don't, I have no idea what. Flash D's whatever's. Oh, flash D. Okay, well.

So it's been a week and a bit for Elsevier. So, Dave, we wanted to have you on. because you wrote a little bit about transformative agreements. And for anyone who doesn't know, the University of California system has recently entered into a very large contract. I hesitate to even call it like a transformative agreement. But those are technicalities we're going to get into. Well, that's what they're calling it.

Yeah. Yeah, I personally use big scare quotes anytime I write transformative agreements, and I always say so-called when I use it verbally. Because I personally don't want to normalize it the way the quote-unquote big deal has become part of our lingo, what I call the big steel. So I'm trying not to make that unquestioningly used on our end. I screwed up the ham horn when he said big steel. I'm going to have to do that in post. Well, can we get a ham horn just for a ham horn?

I also forgot which key bind it was. So, Dave, you've been thinking about this a lot recently. What is a transformative agreement? Well, I don't know what a real transformative agreement would be, but what they call a transformative agreement, it goes by several other names as well. Some people call it a read and publish agreement. Some people call it a publish and read agreement.

Some people call it an offsetting deal. But at its core, it's basically a contract that a library system signs with a publisher, oftentimes the big oligopoly, one of the members of the oligopoly, but it doesn't have to be. Cambridge University Press has signed some smaller societies have as well. But basically, it allows the library, they're authors from that library's institution that publish in an article with the publisher. has the right to make their article open access with that publisher,

with the fee being picked up maybe by the library, maybe by the author or maybe split. We can get into the details. But basically it's where the institution's authors get to make their work open access with the publisher, and that library also gets to read all of the content in the journals. Right. So you're still paying for the subscription.

but you're in some way offsetting the cost of APCs, except when you're not. Yeah. Which is what's confusing me about this deal. It's like what I just mentioned is like the simplified version of it. If you want to get down into like the nitty-gritty detail, technically the UC deal with Elsevier, technically the reading comes free. You know, technically they're only paying APCs.

They're only paying publishing costs. And according to the letter of the. the contract, Elsefer is providing the subscription at no cost. The reading fee is technically zero. But that's not how it works in reality. The APC, the bulk of the, you know, the total cost paid via the APC is paying for publishing and reading. And we can get down into the details of the contract as well, which I don't think the actual contract's been made public yet. The MOU is what's been made available. So, you know, we can only go off of what we see there so far.

Yeah. It's not always the case that the APCs are offsetting, but we can get into the nitty-gritty later. I want to go to something that caught my eye in your fragments that you published recently. And I've got the quote, an author's affiliation with a wealthy school will increasingly determine in their article's global accessibility. The OA provided in a transformative agreement feels rather neocolonial because it makes no attempts

at reciprocal knowledge sharing. We kind of talked about this in our open access episode where we thought because different nations are going to have different priorities, not everyone is going to play this game or even if they wanted to, we can't be sure that they're going to. So could you expand on like the colonial aspects, the international aspects of this?

Yeah, for sure. So in some, I believe transformative agreements are going to increase inequality, both within the U.S. and internationally. So it's going to exacerbate the differences that we see in rankings in higher ed. we're going to see differences in the career success of people who are affiliated with certain institutions. And I think we're just going to see an acceleration of inequality. So one way of looking at it is, you know, there's a lot that's kind of to unpack with that statement that's right there.

Basically, you see or anyone who signs a Transformer agreement, it has this veneer of generosity. So there's like there's no denying that there's going to be a greater output of open access. So on its surface, like that's a great thing. On its surface, that's very hard to argue with or to criticize because you're immediately looking like you're criticizing something that's like unquestionably good. So so there's no denying. Like there's going to probably, you know, there's going to be greater open access content out there as a result of a transformative agreement. So on one hand, I can't argue against, you know, it's hard to argue against that. The question is, at what cost, who gets to be open access, who gets to be heard, and who's

being shut out from that system? So what I mean by an author's affiliation with a wealthy school is we also have to understand that the majority of the journals that Elsevair publishes or that Springer publishes, because UC also has a so-called transformative agreement with Springer, most of these journals are hybrid journals. So there's already, these journals are already a two-tier system. There's already some articles open access, some articles hidden behind a paywall. So there already is discrimination built into the system based on who can pay. So but now it's saying, oh, if you're affiliated with a rich school, a bourgeois institution like University of California, now the chances are

greater that your articles are going to be open access. So if you look at these journals over time, the articles that are going to be open coming from the bourgeois, more wealthy schools, and the authors affiliated with them. And if you're poor, you're not at an R1 or you're not at one of these schools, your contents can be hidden locked the way behind a paywall. So we're going to see the inequality within the U.S. And then we're going to see it globally. It's also worth noting that Europe loves the so-called transformative agreements.

They're the global leaders with it. So in Europe is signing these agreements on a national, on a federal level. So when they sign it, it's like... Yeah, wasn't it the country of Netherlands that did it first, really? Or was it Germany or Netherlands that had like the big Elsevier deal right before UC did? I think they both do at this point. Yeah.

I mean, it's pretty every month, a different European nation is signing one of these agreements with the oligoply. So basically what I'm saying with that statement is the rich are getting richer. The rich schools are going to be able to get their... voices, their content, their authors, their school affiliation names out there at a greater clip with more eyes, more readers, and then more citations. And what I argue also is that the citations is what's going to then come back and recoup greater benefits for the school with the Transform of Agreement. So because their authors are going to be more cited, there's going to be more career success,

there's going to be more grant opportunities, et cetera, et cetera. So there's like this, I call it a false generosity. It's like, oh, we're getting our shit out there. We get out shit. But I don't care that your stuff is still behind a paywall, right? Yeah. And also, like, the journals. A global audience get their stuff made open.

Yeah. And the journals that the oligopoly holds are in themselves, like, a part of that, too. Like, right? Like, because we still value bullshit things like impact factor and stuff like that, right? Right. So that's the other thing that this deal actually not only does nothing to undo, but it doubles downs on, it double downs on the impact factor game. Yeah, it makes that, it makes that problem worse.

Exactly, exactly. So globally, I mean, this is like free eight, you know, this is almost like when the UN or someone goes to Africa and is like, you know, here's some food. It's like, all right, some people have got some food, but it's like, what does that aid, you know, at what costs and what dependencies does this type of aid create? Like, is it more aesthetic and just benefiting the person who's doing it

than the actual material good that it's doing for the sort of people they're white savioring at, kind of. Yeah, I mean, I don't want to say there's no benefit. I mean, if somebody's able to read, read some research and use it in a way that improves their live or their own research or their own teaching and learning, that's great. Right. But it's totally, it's totally a, I feel, a form of false job. But basically, it's creating, like, it's creating a class of scholars that have access to

publishing and distributing their research in a way that other scholars do not have access to to disseminating or I hate that word but to distributing their research in different in in this way that like it's that it's that I guess the exposure factor like you know if you're a scholar on R1 school and you have OA exposure through you know a high impact factor journal you know and like who do those jobs go to right they go to this they're going to go to the same type of people kind of across the board right people who understand how to navigate the systems versus and i guess i'm just repeating everything you're saying um right but yeah but i even even like on the r one level there are better funded r ones than other r ones and like there are bigger systems like the uc

system is a huge fucking system versus like, you know, something like the Iowa Regents. That is just not as big of a system as the UC system. Right. So there's only a handful of schools that I've identified in the U.S. outside of UC that have actually signed a transformative agreement. So that's why I actually appreciate the, you all covering this on the pod and us providing some counter narratives because UC has very much. been on a, to be quite honest, on a propaganda push to really, really spread this model and positioning

themselves as, you know, quote unquote thought leaders on this in the U.S. And they really want this to gain traction in the U.S. mainly because their friends in Europe thinks it's really good. And the UC is going to keep pushing this. So can I tell a quick backstory as to how, why I'm so riled up the his so-called Transformer Review. Yes. So I was at the newspegment. All right, here it is. I was at the OASPA, OASPA, I don't know if you all know about that organization.

I was at the OASPA conference in 2016 when I first came a publishing librarian. And I saw two presentations that really changed the way I thought about a lot of this. I saw Caroline Edwards, who is the co-CEO, co-founder of the Open Library of Humanities, who doesn't hardly get any attention and any love and any credit, at least in the States. But Caroline Edwards is the co-creator of OLLH. She gave a presentation, and that was the first time I saw Open Library of Humanities. It was kind of new then. You know, no APCs.

You know, it's a registered charity. It's like independent, you know, publishing journals, you know, high-standard standards no APCs. I'm like, this, this is great. I saw another presentation from person at UC. I do want to say none of this is personal. I mean, I hope none of my critiques come across as personal. I operate at like structural and system levels. I think from everything I've read from you, it's all very clear that like you're just punching up, you know, like it's all about the system and the structure of the oligopoly. Like, appreciate that. And the bourgeois and the academic universities who are

absolutely. Yeah, they're part of the problem too. Yeah. We all know the neoliberal university is part of the problem, right? So someone from the University of California gave a presentation that was part of a project called the pay it forward study, which was a melon-funded

project. So right there, that's a red flag. It was a melon-funded project that UC led. And they had a couple other partners. I think Harvard was a partner. Elsevere was a partner, and the whole study was dedicated to seeing how can we flip collections money to pay APCs instead of traditional subscriptions, and how can we increase the revenue to the oligopoly by adding in grant money, which is exactly what we see them doing now. There was an element of that project that really pissed me off too, because what they really were pushing for as well was to create individual faculty publishing accounts. So there's a huge parallel here with the healthcare system, like the way that healthcare is bought and paid for in the U.S.

They basically wanted to create a health savings account for each author, each faculty member at UC to have an allotment for them to, you know, have the free choice in the market and how they would spend that in the free market of academic publishing. And they wanted their authors to quote quote have skin in the game. So they wanted their authors to have skin in the game. And they wanted their authors to, they wanted to push the authors out there with their little. publishing money, and they wanted them to exert the pressure on the oligopoli to try to bend the prices down. While the library was also supplementing that with collections money that they wanted to flip into APCs, they weren't calling it Transformative Agreements that, but that was in 2016. So this has actually been in the works for a while. Now we call it Transformer Agreements, but most of that

has kind of panned out. And interestingly, if you're watching this, I think it was also in 2016, the UCLA University of Librarian bucked the rest of the system, and Jenny Steele published a open letter denouncing the pay-it-forward study, the outcomes, and that plan, I believe, five years ago. And I revisited it to prep for the pod. And all of her criticisms pretty much stand up. All of her predictions pretty much stand up. So in some respects, I'm just building off of her criticisms

that she levied from within the system five years ago. Yeah, I mean, you can see that with people who originally critiqued the big deals in the 90s. They said, here's exactly what's going to happen. You're going to lose collection expertise. You're going to be locked into these things forever. And you're never going to be able to get out of them. And like, that was entirely bored out. So it's not surprising that, you know, there are a lot of people at the foresight for, for transformative agreements and what they were

going to do because if you know I obviously have only been in the space for so long so you know I would have been not that long out of grad school when this happened when that letter was written but so can I can I explain why I think this is really a bad deal for UC authors as well despite you know the propaganda saying that the faculty are on board and the faculty want this and the faculty are you know looking forward to it yeah I think let's go directly into the UC specifics now okay so my understanding of this is, once again, very similar to the way healthcare works out. So you know how your HMO says, oh, Justin, Carrie, Jay, Sadie, you know, your doctor wants to charge you this amount, but because they have a contract... I have a PPO.

Sorry, I'm just being an ass. Carrie's misbehaving, sorry. So you know the HMO is like, oh, the doctor has this sticker price, but because, you know, you're a valued member of the HMO, we've negotiated this grand discount for you. And then, you know, we're going to pay some of it for you. And then the remaining bill, you know, you've got to pick up. So that is a multi-payer system, which is a really shitty system. UC is calling their transformative agreement a multi-payer system that somehow that's like virtuous. So the, Oh, my God. Like, you looked at healthcare and thought, this is a great idea. Let's cop that. Like, yeah, you. See it like this.

They talk about stuff like this. People who do open educational resources are like, if you do an inclusive access program, that's like, you know, how you pay for your health care. And so everyone will be covered. Oh, I know. Yeah, like the... Like, healthcare isn't fucked. What?

I don't know why anyone ever thinks this is a good metaphor to use. You know, I love it. So this, sorry to derail, which is my job here. But this is relevant, I promise. I have, okay, so I went to college with a friend, and he doesn't listen to this. Sorry, like, he barely knows I'm a librarian, which is how I like it. But he, like, had some mental health issues and dropped out. And he just started going back to school at, like, 32, at age 32.

And he's going online and he's like, you know, he'll text me something now and then I'll just be like, he's like, yeah, what the fuck is up with like academic journal articles? Like, why are they $40? Like, why isn't knowledge free? And I'm just like, dude, I could like sit you down and tell you all about this. And he's just like, you know, a guy trying to get a natural resources degree. Just like, it just seeps down to every fucking level. Like just the undergrad trying to get a natural resources degree online, you know, trying to get a natural resources degree online, you know, trying to. get his paper has to get tangled up with a world of scholarly publishing when you you find an article and it says it's $40. You just don't want to open that whole can of worms on him. Yeah. It's really, it's like, well, let me tell you about a company called Elsevier. And it's like, I don't want to unleash this on you, but there's a whole world here that's going to explain all this to you and about why this is the way it is.

And like, yes, there are some alternatives to it, but they're terrible alternatives. because they're the alternatives made by corporations and designed by neoliberal institutions, which are, you know, people are trying to run them like corporations because we can't think of it. You know, the people who thought of these ideas weren't think, am I being picked up here? Okay, cool. The people who thought of these things weren't thinking of anything better to do because, you know, they're all dumb as fuck. And they were coming up with these ideas when they were feeling dumb as fuck. Like, you know.

Broke. Okay. That's the fuck button now, too. Yeah. But it's just like all of this stuff. Like it's not like it is literally some people in a back room doing devious shit so they can make a bunch of fucking money and swim in their Scrooge McDuckpool. Like. Did you tell your friend that? No. But I was just like, well, there's this company called Elsevier and that explains a lot of it. But they're not the only one. And, you know, that's just one of the major players. If you want to look into one of the worst ones, if you're. curious why. But I mean, it's just one of the things. It affects everyone. Right. I mean, and I feel like what happens is like there's like low key like passive gas lighting that happens with the whole system because like your friend or someone might think, you know, there must be a reason why it's $40 or you know, some people, some people second guess their gut feeling that the

system is is fucked up and that it really is. And they start, they might internalize or feel like they're missing something. So I feel like that. I wonder how many people. I wonder how many people because like I'm not an academic in any way. I work in a public library, et cetera, et cetera. And I know that when I was doing research for stuff like that off of like, you know, ProQuest and all of the stuff off my college library, like I would have assumed that that $40 was going to the authors. It doesn't. Exactly.

So like, you know, I wonder how many people out there are like, oh, well, I'll pay this because I can because I want to support, you know, the research authors. and it's like, no, not even close. Yeah, it's not like if you buy an album from a band, the band sees some of that money. Exactly. It's like you are paying the publisher for all of that. Like, the author doesn't even have any rights to that information anymore. Like, that's what it is.

It's not even, it's worse than Spotify. Like, they're not even getting a fraction of a penny. Yeah, no, it's worse than Spotify. And that's like, that's the best way to describe scholarly publishing, worse than Spotify. Yeah, that's a tagline. line. Yeah. Like, and I think that's like, and it, and it affects how, it actually affects how undergraduates research, like as an information literacy person, these things affect how people

research. It affects how they interact with information. It affects what they're going to include it in their research papers. It affects the world of information that we live in. And even like transformative agreements, that's not going to solve those problems. No, what I was going to say is like, I think it even trickles up to librarians when it comes to Transformative Agreements. When I, when I released that my musings, I got reactions from librarians who felt like they were missing something. They were like, oh, you know, I kind of felt, kind of had an iffy feeling about transformative

agreements, but I just thought I was missing something, you know, I just thought I was kind of missing the big picture. And I feel like the people who are pushing this, you know, they're hiding behind some fancy language, and it's pulling the wool over the eyes of a lot of librarians as well. So I'm glad I actually dropped that piece a week before the Alspair deal came out, because the details in this deal are even worse than the details that I went into in the piece that I dropped. So this deal, it knocks, it's like that, once again, let's go back to the HMO.

It's like the HMO saying, we're knocking 10 to 50. 15% off the sticker price that Elsevarez is throwing out there. Right? So we already know the APC is an inflated, you know, profit-heavy number that's way above any true cost of publishing. And the negotiators were able to knock off 10 to 15% off of that price. And then they turn around and tell the UC, their authors, their faculty, you know, we will cover $1,000 of the remaining.

and if you have grant money, we want you to pitch in the rest. So that's kind of a crucial detail of how this transformative agreement works. It's very explicit that the whole thing is predicated on tapping the faculty's grant money. So I broke down what one of this might look like, and it's so awful. I picked one of the cell journals because that's like the cream of the crop. That's where you see wants their authors to publish. them to publish and sell. Sales APC in a little over 12 months jumped from $5,900 to a shade under $10,000.

Sales APC is now $99,900. Yeah, fuck sell. And I shouldn't say that because I need people to, you know, I need that journal, but fuck, fuck that publication. Right. So, yeah, exactly. So it's a name brand, right? Absolutely.

These people don't hide the fact that the journals are name brand products, right? Oh, yeah. Cell has a super high impact factor. Hamhorn. Hamhorn. Hamboning. But yeah, Cell is one of those journals that, like, if you're in cell, you're in fucking sell.

Like it's a Lancet level kind of publication in my field. And like, yeah, when I saw that number come out, I was like, fuck this. Fuck this. Like, it was upsetting. Like every time I, especially because I work in sciences and I have people who want to publish open access because we're always pushing it. But we have a $10,000 open access fund for faculty each year. And we can only cover up to $1,000 for each person. Like, what's that going to cover? And I work out of research one institution. Like, that's not going to do much. Like, that's what we're working with. And, like, it's not possible. Right. So what this deal is saying is they're not, the deal says knock off 10,000, sorry, 10% off the sticker price. The library then ponies up $1,000. And then it's asking the authors to pick up the remainder. So for sale, it would mean the library pays $1,000. The author pays $1,000. The author pays $1,000.

about $8,000 out of their grant money. So that's about a $10.90 split, which is worst in the insurance companies. Co-insurance for most plans is a $2080 split. This is a $10.90 split. So this is asking authors under this big deal that, you know, supposed to be the greatest thing, to pay $8,000 towards the APC. That's fucking nuts. Like, this daylight robbery. Wait, well, sell still publishes print.

additions too. But like, I mean, come on. Well, I mean, if you're in UC author, at the end of the, at the end of the day, you're still doing all the research. You're still writing the paper. You're still asked to be a peer reviewer and or an editor. And now you're asked to do more work for Elsevair because you see your employer is now telling you, we want you to get more grant money, you know, spend more time on your grant. applications and work harder to get that grant money and then funnel it over to the publisher as well. So it's actually a labor question as well because it's actually putting more, it's asking more time and labor of the author. And it's asking their own authors to work harder for the oligopoly.

So we all obviously need to be chairing for this, right? But it's transformative. For the publisher. Yes. It's transformative into a Scrooge McDuck pool. is George McDuck Justin thanks for

linking to the MOU as well because I looked at the MOU and it's got like all this fancy language UC

agrees to actually prepay the expected costs for the upcoming year in advance so it's letting the

Agapoli hold their money interest free a year at a time and then at the end of the deal

get this any money that's left over from their prepayments and whatever else, when they reconcile all the balances at the end of the deal, if I'm reading this right, Al-Savir keeps 40% of the remaining balance. That's almost their profit margin. So, sorry if I missed it,

but one thing I wanted to ask about the grant funding part of this is, is there any enforcement mechanism on the authors to pave with grants? Because it says, the words I keep seeing are like, are encouraged or they don't really say like required anywhere that I read it. So it's like what if authors, because I've worked with our sponsored programs and I think like maybe three or four faculty have ever used grant funding to pay an APC. So, you know, is there an enforcement mechanism to make sure that grant money is going into the pockets of relics?

That's a good question. I don't know. All that's been shared publicly, and this is kind of the other kind of screwy thing about transformative agreements is that the authors kind of get hit with the bill at the very tail end of the publishing process. Once again, kind of like the HMOs. You don't know what the cost is until after the procedure is done. So once the article is accepted, then you kind of log into this payment system, you tell them your UC, and then it spits you out the remaining price. So you don't know what you're, there's no easy way of knowing what your balance do is until the tail end of the

process. It then asks you, do you have grant money available? If you click no, I think the MOU or something I read says, you have to provide one reason from a list of options given as to why you're not paying out of any grant money. After that, I really don't know what their enforcement mechanism is. If there is one, I don't think that they're telling us about it because they don't want this to seem like a, you know, a punitive, you know, as bureaucratic as it truly is. I know some schools that do have like an APC fund do check with the sponsored office, sponsor programs office. And if you have any grants listed there, you aren't ineligible for tapping the APC fund. I don't know if UC is going that far as to say if you have any grant on record that you, you know, that you would then be

ineligible from additional library money or if they'll take people's word that they just don't have the money. But I mean, I can't imagine if you're a PI and you see your remaining balance $8,000 and you're wondering, well, you know, how much further, how many more, you know, assistance can you pay and how much more research can you do for $8,000 than pony it over to a publisher. Yeah, it's really confusing. And it's, I mean, I've gotten to the point where I don't want us to have an APC fund ever. It was one of the things, like, when I started this position like three years ago, I thought, you know, that'd be cool to have like a subvention fund or something. Now with the cost of APCs, it's like, oh, cool, we could pay one APC with $10,000. All right, that's really, we could just give the $10,000 to, like, any of the open access journals that we run. And that would be a huge boon for any one of them. And, you know, that would pay for 10 articles that they would be openly publishing on our platform. And so, like, you know, why?

And we're an R2, you know, like, we've got some money. But no one has that much money. money. Just no one has the amount of money to keep these sustainable, yet sustainability is what's invoked because these are our mortal enemies, very serious people. And like you said, there's a lot of obfuscating language, which is their primary weapon. And I think the main goal of the podcast is to make fun of them. Yeah. Well, and I think one of the other points is that like these, the oligopoly, all of these components of it, like the publishers or, uh, you know, corporations involved.

Like, they're all corporations. They're all in the business of making money. Libraries are not in the business of making money. And I think that's where a lot of this tension arises and where I think where we miss a lot of things in these agreements, in these deals, in these situations like that. And I think that's where we get had in a lot of ways. And especially because business as a. concept has become such a fucking thing in the neoliberal university. And to an extent, I've always seen these kinds of platforms and out, like, you know,

this whole kind of situation of the oligopoly as like a form of outsourcing labor. And that's just kind of how libraries have always done it. We've always outsourced this part of what we do because we didn't build it from the ground up to begin with. And there are some that are finally figuring out that maybe that wasn't a great idea. But I really liked what you had to say about that in your assorted musings about, like, you know, that whole reimagining kind of component about it. And, you know, looking at the black radical tradition of re-educating. And I had a bunch of notes, but I think my cat knocked them over or something. Yeah. I, I, I, I,

have a lot of papers floating around here, but I take a lot of notes. And I just liked a lot of the things you had to say because they really spoke to me in a number of things about like just the way libraries operate. Because I think they can be applied not just to scholarly communication and not just to publishing, but also just to, you know, administration management, information literacy, et cetera. Because that's just like I think it points out a lot of just like some of the things that are wrong with libraries, period. Right. I appreciate that. I really appreciate that. And I love for us to talk a little bit about political education or lack thereof among our colleagues. Always here for it. But that's why I think these transformative agreements are really illustrative, because it really shows a disconnect between the rank and file librarians and library administrators.

So the transform of agreements with more than most things that I've seen, huge disconnect in terms of popularity of so-called transform of agreements with rank and file, mostly scholarly communication librarians. Most people are fully against these deals or their gut just tells them to be against these deals. And the only people who are kind of seen intrigued by them or are in favor of them are at the very highest levels. And I think those who are in favor of them at the very highest levels within the library are take that stance because they see it as a way for them to quote unquote prove value to the parent university. I think that you see. I've sometimes seen it in people who want to be in positions of power, like that support for those kinds of things. Right. Because it makes them look like a, you know, a powerful person, you know, a dealmaker, you know, someone who's a quote unquote thought leader.

Someone who's talking to vendors who has relationships with vendors because to them they see vendors as a component with power. You know, I don't want to pathologize it or anything like that because that seems kind of unfair. But like I always get an icky feeling when vendors are involved. So here's something that that should make you feel a little icky. Well, first of all, I mean, it's to me, it's very clear to me, hopefully to others that like, you know, when you buy a transform of agreement, you're paying for prestige, right? You're paying to be, you're paying for your authors to be in these top flight journals. You're just straight up. It's a monetary transaction for prestige that the school who is receiving it and paying for it,

they're finding other ways to capitalize on it. So check this out. The OA 2020 organization that's mostly based out of Europe, but like UC is totally in on it and a couple other U.S. schools, but mostly is like a European phenomenon. OA 2020 is based out of the Max Planck Institute in Germany. and they're all up on transformative agreements. The CEO of Springer was on one of their boards up until recently. The CEO of Springer, Nature, who now has transformative agreements with the Max Planck Society,

with UC, with many other nations, was on the Senate, the Max Planc Senate. So there's very, very cozy relationships with the research institutes and the oligopoly. Well, I mean, like, vendors are members of the American Library Association. It's the same kind of shit. Like, they're part of it. Like, that's why so much of what the ALA does is about, you know, sucking off vendors, for lack of a better term. I'm feeling very vulgar right now, by the way. Big nerd slot.

What was that? That was from that hearing where Nira Tandon was getting questioned. And he said, this guy from Arkansas was, like, Like, you've called Senator Sanders everything except an ignorant slut. Ignorant slut. And he said that in the Senate hearing. Someone else behind him goes, well, I wouldn't say ignorant. Bernie Sanders is just a slut.

Yeah, he fucks and we'll continue to fuck unless we stop him. But I mean, like, that's like what our library association. I mean, like, that's, it's not my library association. I'm a woman without an association. But I mean, it's like, it's that kind of thing. that we see very clearly in, like, the major professional associations, bodies, practices. Like, they are so cozy with vendors. Like, they all have, like, a fucking pavilion for ProQuest, you know?

Right. I mean, who sponsors so many of our conferences, right? Oh, yes. I think it was an ACL. I think it was in Baltimore and ACRL. I think, like, Sage had a party yacht. And, like, I had a friend from Princeton who was, like, on the ACR. party yacht or on the stage party yacht and she was like I couldn't get off the fucking sage party yet like and it was the funniest story I've ever heard about the sage party at like like she's like I don't know why I'm on the stage party yet like um I mean it's all those things like you know you go you walk around and someone's like hey EBSCO is having a dinner I'm like I don't want to have dinner with EBSCO that sounds like a nightmare like maybe if they would just fix their

password functions I would maybe have a petty for like maybe but like I don't want to eat their food I don't want to drink their beer like I'll pay for it myself like that's why I have an institutional credit card and surely you can afford your your own pens paper and top bags yeah yeah well I I collect the glasses cloths that's what I do that's my game because these specs get dirty um but it's things like that like the feeding um the literal feeding the literal feeding um the literal feeding um which i do pay for my own alcoholic beverages when i travel by the way you're better person than i am i will totally have someone just chill out and give me money for i actually get like a set amount per day so it like

doesn't really matter so um it's all just kind of water under the fridge Water under the fridge, yep Texas allow you to reimburse alcohol But I just use my own cash anyway Because I'm I was raised religiously so So can we circle back to the political education

And the stuff Carrie that you were Yes please let's talk about political education And libraries and like yeah things like that I mean that's kind of like the hobby horse That I've been on And Carrie I do want to mention I did appreciate your comradly allyship when I was part of that teaching

last summer. Oh, that was so great. That was so good. I'm smack in the chat. Appreciate the real-time defense. So as a librarian of color, I hate to say, you know, identify a person in color or whatever. You know, as a brown man in this world, I appreciate the people come to the fence in real time.

Like, that's what us people need, not be after the fact, you know, like in the hallway type of, you know, reaction that, that unfortunately is all too common. But like the one thing that I'm realizing, so like, you know, I'm basically ready for revolution. I'm trying to get ready for revolution. I'm trying to get other people ready for revolution. We need to stay ready.

That's why I appreciate, like, I've seen a podcast like this, you know, providing some education from the grassroots to the grassroots, you know, from a, from a, from a perspective because I feel you know there's a lot of work to be done and I feel like there's not a lot of time left for us to be wasting pandemic has made that more clear but for me like it really traces back to the the you know one of my watershed moments was to unite the right um terrorism right here in in Charlottesville 2017 like I had a coat like this doesn't get talked about enough I have a coworker, a library worker who was almost murdered by the Nazis with the torches that night. I don't know how much the library profession really talked about that.

He won an award for courage. My coworker was almost murdered that night. He saw something and he tried to do something. He was with the students and other members of the public and a few university employees who were at the rotunda the night that the Tika torches came out with the Nazis. and my coworker was almost murdered. I couldn't look at my coworker almost get killed and he has like permanent disability and not like not have that affecting.

So like that's like where like a lot of my fear got lost. Like a lot of my like give the dams got lost. And like that's where like I really decided like I had to step like step my game up. But I want like other people to step their game up, right? So like add on top of that, you know, 45 becoming president. You know, all that stuff kind of happening around the. same time, you know, I don't vote anymore, so it doesn't make a difference

with, you know, 46 being in there right now. For me, it was a... I used to be like that. I actually started voting recently, and I used to not vote, like you, because I was so fucking disappointed, but now I'm just like, I guess I got it now. Like...

Yeah, you don't have to. Um, but you can talk about that. But I understand why people don't. Like, I think there's a very good reason not to. And I will defend why people don't vote. But I guess one of my points is, is like, I really tried to step up my game with, like, my own political education. Like, like, my own journey. Like, you know, I feel like I was like, like how the typical liberal person is in our field, like the rest of our colleagues. Like,

I was swimming in those same ideas, thoughts, et cetera. And then like I gradually grew more and more left. And I feel like these events pushed me, pushed me further left. But sometimes I really wonder, like, where is our effort best directed? And I try to play like this inside outside game. Like, that's where I feel like a pod like this is, is nice because it's like, it's aimed at our colleagues. And it's like a white liberal, you know, middle class profession where it's like just a rung or two below like the bourgeoisie. Whereas like the broader fights obviously out there in the, in the public, in our communities, but our neighbors, et cetera, with people who are like, don't have the the labor privileges that we do. The best conclusion I've come to is like we've got to fight on all

fronts. That's why I like this, but we've got to also, you know, fight more broadly. But it's just like, you know, I don't see, I don't see enough from our profession. And I've reached a point where like I've come to expect that to not really be disappointed by that. So you're not perpetually disappointed. But I guess what I'm saying, like, that's why I kind of threw some of that stuff out in those uncensored musings that I release because it was just like, you know, there's no harm. I'm just going to throw this out there. Whatever happens happens. And it's just like, Like, you know, maybe reading a little less Michelle Obama memoir, a little more, something else. You know, like, are we really, how organized are we even those of us who are self-described critlib?

You know, crit live is a hashtag. Like, that's all right. You know, that's better than nothing. But are we organized in any way? Those of us who are on the left, have any radical? Yeah. I think the actual, like, radical. And I mean, there have been so many colors of that over the history of librarianship.

If you really take a look at it, like, even dating back to like turn of the century librarians because I've looked at like labor history and libraries. Because that's like, I don't know. I got into that for a while. And like you can look at like, you know, labor history and libraries and how people have tried to organize over the years and like, you know, mod i think her name was mod montgomery trying to unionize the a la in 19 and i mean like yeah we suck at organizing ourselves to some extent like you have all these people talking about how they you know you got a lot of people talking about like organizing their own workplaces and stuff and that's great but we're not very good at organizing a larger body um and doing that i think the political education

is the other component that I see missing. And I think that's really daunting for a lot of people too because they saw Critlib and thought, ooh, critical theory, that's daunting. And then you had other people saying, critical theory, there's not enough critical theory here. And that was, I think, maybe one of the errors of Critlib in some ways. I think that you guys can hear me now, right?

Yes, better. For some reason, my mic went way down. I think kind of one of the inspiring reasons behind doing a podcast was no one's going to read my shit, but I know that like 100 people are going to listen to an episode, even when we first start out. And so it's like, and you also don't have to sound all that smart.

I mean, we bring smart people on here to sound smart and then derail them. But then I asked them questions about anime. And I'm like, hey, how does this apply to full metal alchemists? Like, I was trying. I spent 10 minutes looking for, when you guys were talking about cell, I was looking for the perfect cell theme from Dragon,

ball, but I couldn't, I couldn't get it on the soundboard fast enough. I, do you want to hear a funny story? Had to have students explain Goku to me a few years ago. Oh, yeah? Yeah, I don't know. That's why, that's why you bought that silk shirt afterwards? Yeah. It's just the big Goku with a nug a weed as a spirit bomb.

Yeah, the big weed nug. That was really what did me, though. But yeah, anyway, sorry, that was my derailment. But, like, okay, so back to Critlib, Nicole Pekowski had a really good thread on, like, what was hashtag critlib um where did it come from and that was it was actually really formative but like one of things that like became a problem with it was like people were like theory is too hard but i also think that like so many people who work in libraries like live theory and they don't know it like that was something for me that became fundamental when i was working in public libraries and i was like working with formerly

incarcerated people in like a predominantly black and Muslim neighborhood and that was like like, oh, yeah, I'm like fucking living theory right now. And then I went on to live theory and went on to read theory. And I was like, oh, yeah, this fucking connects. And, you know, there's a lot of things that I was doing as I was working that I wasn't quite connecting. And then I eventually started connecting politically to what I was experiencing like with the neighborhood I was working with and the populations I was working with and the problems that the populations were having with where they were working. And for me, one of the points that really radicalized me was actually, I was in academic libraries at the time and I was, you know, working out of college. But it was Mike Brown because that was like not far from where my mom grew up. But it was also, it was the kind of neighborhood that I used to work in across the state in Kansas City. And it's like, those are the kind of kids that I used to work with. And that was like something that like hit me really hard. And I'm centering myself. around this conversation now.

I should shut up. But like that was something that was politically significant for me in developing a political awareness of like what we do as librarians, you know, not just. I think that was like just politically important to me for recognizing certain kinds of things about what I was doing as a librarian. And especially what that meant, even in an academic context, like how do we recognize, you know, black lives in libraries? how do we recognize, you know,

non-white voices and libraries and things like that. So, you know, developing that conscious and that, that praxis component of like, how do we take our, what we're saying and what we want to act upon? And you had a really great point about this. And it's kind of something that I take from, it's one of my favorite parts from Palo Fara too, which is that like this really committing to truth telling,

but also like taking that, you know, action and theory and putting them together in a really meaningful way, but like having that consciousness to do it in a meaningful way. Right. You absolutely have to do both. The one thing, like, the other thing that I, when people chat with me is like, I tell people, I'm just making shit up as I go along. I don't have a PhD in any of this stuff. Like, we all are. also like also with the transform of agreements one of the leaders of it has a PhD in economics which actually I found intimidated some people it was like I think having not having a PhD in economics actually gives you a better perspective on some of the stuff because you don't have to unlearn anything

but it's just like you know we just we just need to get in there and get messy and get get dirty with it and just make it up as we go along and do it together and that's where I see like the podcast as potentially really podcast as potentially really podcast powerful because it's like it really is me doing like what they say of like meeting people where they're at. Right. So like meeting people in an accessible language. That's that's how we do it. We've got to we've got to wage it on all these on all these fronts. And podcasting, you know, until until Apple and Google say otherwise is one of the few venues where there's a relatively equal playing field and getting these voices out. Yeah. Well, of course, if you want to come on any time, you're more than welcome because there's a million things. talk about regarding labor and

political education. There's so much I want to get to, but we're already at an hour and I don't want to keep you too long. We usually ask one kind of closing question, which is to, we have two. Okay, Carrie, you click the hand-up button and it's just making your video wiggle

that says Carrie has something to say. I think I meant to click my unmute button at one point, and I accidentally click the hand-up. It's very funny-looking. Oh, I'm sorry. Very Wiggles. Okay, so we got two questions. One is in fully automated luxury, gay, space communism.

If we were to imagine a perfect world or a post-revolutionary world so we can stop being very serious people for a minute. What would academic publishing look like? Would we still have it? Do we dream of a future where it still exists? I think it would still exist, but I have no idea what it would look like. I've kind of, so there's, if people look at the fragments piece that might be linked into into the show notes, I linked to an article I wrote a few years ago where I kind of spelled out a vision of what cooperatives could look like. I've actually backtracked from a lot of

that because I've got a lot of thoughts on what the position of libraries are, right, in terms of all this. And I think I overstated the potential for, for libraries to be liberating because, you know, we're part of this, almost all libraries are part of the state. So I kind of backtracked in that. And ever since I've just been really uber cautious from trying to prescribe

or predict too much about what things would look like. All I know is that it would not be, we wouldn't be exploited. Sorry, did you just admit to not being a library futurist? Kelsey Priest. Could pause there, Justin. Yeah, okay. Well, this is a question

that's from number one super fan The Fiend, number one super fan of the pod. So this was when we were talking about librarian rock stars and the question is Fred Durst, great librarian rock star

or greatest librarian rock star? Are you telling me that Fred Durst is a librarian? I mean, what makes a librarian? Yeah, we're all librarians at heart. Maybe librarians was the new medal, we listened to all along.

Are you telling me the cataloging Steve isn't just Fred Durs? I think I just, you're not allowed to use someone else's photo. Yeah, that's against the Twitter rules and we know how sensitive they are about that. Jay has some anger built up. Jay, you have been so quiet tonight until we mentioned Twitter rules. I'm salty about it. I'm mad. I like how we just didn't answer that question.

Look, it was a good question in the sense that it answered itself. That way we don't have to. Okay. So, Dave, thanks so much for coming on. And yay, yay, applause. Hang on. I got applause too. We'll link to your, we will link to your, I caught it this time.

We'll link to your work and everything. Is there anything else you wanted to plug, any upcoming work or your Twitter handle, or do you want people to leave you alone? Yeah, read the work that Justin's going to link to. I'm semi-anonymous on Twitter, but I don't mind if my handle's in the show notes as well. I've got a presentation coming up to the library publishing forum that's going to be put on YouTube, so I encourage people to check that out, kind of building on a lot of the criticisms here. But I do have some work in progress that's taking this analysis further.

So I encourage others to engage, reach out. People can reach out to me. I'm interested in talking further with comrades and just keep pushing. And thank you for having me. I appreciate the invite and I'd be excited to return as well. Great. Thanks for being on. Yeah, it was a blast.

Sorry, I was quiet. Thanks for putting up with my misbehavans. Misbehaven. Good night.