librarypunk - 023 - Read and Let Read

Episode Date: August 7, 2021

This week we’re joined by AJ Boston to talk about his Read and Let Read proposal for scholarly journal articles. We also talk about consortial approaches to publishing, the new UKRI open access policy, Carrie’s formative experiences with Alvin and the Chipmunks, and 9/11.  https://twitter.com/AJ_Boston  Twitter thread on Read and Let Read: https://twitter.com/AJ_Boston/status/1393288071836094464  Dave Ghamandi fragments on scholarly communications: https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:35125/  UKRI announces new Open Access Policy – UKRI

Oh, man, I forgot to do an intro again. I'm Justin. I'm a Scholar Communications librarian. My pronouns are he and him. I'm Jay. I'm an academic metadata librarian, and my pronouns are also he, him. A.J. Boston, Scallcom librarian, he, him. Great. And AJ, you don't have to lean into the microphone. It's picking you up fine. Someone once told me a very wise person once said to lean in. It's making you peek a little. That's fine. That was a good joke.

Thank you, Jay. Jason. I'm just going to cut out me not getting the joke again like I did with the with the Rocky Horror reference. Oh, yeah, when me and Milo were just Rocky Horroring all over the podcast. Yeah, I completely missed the joke, and so I cut out me looking dumb. Justin, have you ever thought about doing a visual version of the podcast, maybe for like Patreon-only fans?

Patreon-only fans. We should start an only fans. We've talked about it. Yeah, we were tweeting about it, and then this one weird only fans spam bot account was like retweeting us. It was very funny. I've probably, I'm sorry, I've probably listened to a third of your episodes, and I just want to note for the people that have not been on the show that I'm seeing everyone's face, and I've always wondered what U.R. All's faces were doing as the music played. and now I know that you both kind of solemnly look down and make reverent space for the theme music to play. Sometimes I like do a little dance.

I normally do the keyboard thing, but I think we both just like ADHDed out for a moment. Yeah. It's like there's no stimulus. They have to do something. Whenever I was playing poker with people, they're like, you have an amazing poker face. I'm like, no, I just got bored, like waiting for you to play. Where's my, like, casino heist movie where instead of having some sort of, like, autistic person who can do car counting in their head? But it's just like a ADHD person who's good at poker because they just get bored.

That's the, that's the movie I want. Yeah, I learned the other day Gina Gershaw is a professional poker player. So is Jennifer Tilly, I think. Or did I just bowled? Anyway. Boys night. So let's see. AJ, you are a scholarly communications librarian.

You were a fellow at Library Publishing Forum. And is there anything else I should do to introduce you to people who may not know you? Oh, let's see. I am on the Copee steering committee starting this year for SPARP, the Coalition of Open Access Policy Institutes. And I think that's, yeah, I think that's it. I think that's it. It's more than I'm doing.

You're doing a podcast. That's true. It does take up a surprising amount of time. I can tell. There was a lot of prep and I appreciate you doing that. Yeah, that was some really quick, good prep. Justin, I'm actually quite impressed. If it's OA, I can just, like, churn it out.

So that's one of your, like, can talk about it in your sleep things. Mm-hmm. It's not hard. And it's, you know, also great because we never really make any progress, so I don't have to, like, learn anything new. So a little behind the scenes, we're recording in the middle of the workday for the first time. So it's like really bright out. And I didn't put on my podcasting hoodie. So I'm like all out of whack.

But also, since it is Saturday, August 6th, UK, what is it? Oh, I've been off for like two days. So I have no idea what day it is. It's Friday, August 6th. And UKRI just dropped their breaking open access news. which I didn't create like an OA news drop, but I could just... Sooka, bled! OA News.

So UKRI put an updated policy that requires immediate open access for peer-reviewed research article submitted for publication from after April 1st, 2022. April Fool's. Yeah. I haven't read through the whole thing, like the official document, but I figure it's more or less what I expected, which is they're going to put some money. into getting UK universities to take up more open access journal agreements, whatever form that comes in, and either via the version of record in a journal or publishing platform or by depositing the accepted manuscript or version of record in an institutional repository, which I think is the more powerful part of this statement of this policy, because green open access is easier to do and cheaper and less overhead.

because you basically just need a journal to agree that they're okay with it, and then the library kind of does the rest. So green open access has been pretty powerful force, even though everyone wants us to talk about gold open access, which is article publishing charge, funded open access. So this is the first that I'm seeing this, Jess, and so thanks for bringing this to my attention. From your description, it sounds like they're remaining kind of agnostic

toward how you go about becoming OA as opposed to other agreements. They're saying you can either go, you mentioned there was a fund. So you have the option to either go gold APC-driven open access or green open access, just as long as you're doing one of those. Yes, it looks like it. And from what I can tell, there's some funding for implementing. It looks like they're just okay with whatever. approach you do as long as you get it done.

Yeah. So I think some of the money is going to open access agreements. And then the other part is going to like individual campuses creating their own policies that will, you know, probably based on like the like the Harvard model, which is we have a license to your article so we can put it in the repository no matter what. Justin, what's your read on why UKRI is. taking this stance. It looks like there's more flexibility. I'm thinking about, I don't remember what article it was that I read yesterday, but it was talking about Coalition S and how that may

lead to inequities. And I wonder if, and then the other thing you see is researchers sometimes raise the flag that this is limiting their academic freedom. So I wonder if this is a response to those critiques as a way of just being flexible to what academics are able to do and what they want to do. What I read today is that this comes out of the 2018 policy research that they started doing. So this has been in the works for like three years. And so they've just gotten enough feedback that they're trying, I'm guessing they probably don't even have that much authority to really force people's hands.

Like, they kind of, I think UKRI just covers like promotion and tenure stuff. I don't think they can really tell universities how to publish their articles. But I can probably, you know, I can probably invite someone else on to come and talk about it who's involved with the UKRI because that's a whole ecosystem that you would have to learn. And it's just so different. Well, speaking of receiving feedback, I see Kerry has joined us. Hello. Can you hear me? Yeah, you're a little low, but I think you're fine.

Yeah. Okay. Hi, can you hear me? Yay. Yes. That's higher. Hey, yeah, I was rage cleaning, so. That's a, yeah.

I was just getting comfy in my giant beanbag chair with the old queen I am. Like, I got to get my blanket. It's the middle of the day. So, yeah, that was breaking O.A. news. Sook a bleat. Apologies. to any Russian speakers who know what that means. Was that Privet Medved?

Or? I don't know. It's just a meme. It's the only Russian... The only Russian meme I know is Prevette Medved because one of my best friends from grad school was like a Soviet studies person and like he studied abroad in Russia and taught me about Prit Medved. And like the...

Who's like a bear? And not the fun kind. Do I have complete blinders on or is there? They're almost never, like, O-A or Skullcom news that comes out of Russia. Skollcom news doesn't come out of Russia. Russia comes out of Skull-Com news. In Soviet Russia. Hang on, I need to take a screenshot to carry his face after the show.

With your big goss bug glasses. I think that's interesting. we always hear analysis about particularly from the White House about what China is doing with their research, but it's a big blank empty when it comes

to Russia as far as I can tell. Yeah. Plus it's, you know, Sihab. Yeah, like the only like Skalkan Russia stuff you ever hear is just like, oh, well, Syhub.

All the bad stuff is happening. Because it hurts capitalism. Exactly. Kizhtani's are furiously throwing their water bottles across the room as you said it came out of Sipov. It came out of Russia. Yeah, because that's where it was hosted, right?

Was Kazakhstan? I think it's... No. Kazakhstan. She is Kazakhstan. Yeah, she's Kazakh. Yeah. I think it might have been hosted in Ukraine.

I'm not sure where it's hosted. But, I mean, it's probably also, like, backed up in, like, caves in Afghanistan or something. or like I think low orbit like satellites and stuff like that stuff like the pirate bay used to do you can never take side hub down distributed servers it would be so easy to make a new one like even if they block it everywhere like you could you could technically start all over again it wouldn't take that long yeah just make a primo add-on for it one of my one of my colleagues made a mock-up of that primo hyphen explore hyphen sigh hyphen hub

I mean, you can, I have like a bookmarklet for SciHub. It's just called Get That Article. Yeah, because Boston University Libraries made the unpaywall one. Yeah, umpaywall is good. And you should also, if you're a researcher and don't know this trick, you should put your university proxy into your bookmarks. And so if you find yourself on a journal page, you just click the proxy. it'll insert the proxy into the URL

and that way you don't have to go back to your libraries page. Zotero can do that too. True. Also use Zotero. Yeah, especially if you have the web bookmarklet thing, the web clipper. If you put your proxy, your university proxy into that, it'll reroute things through it

when it attacks things. It's pretty good. The Zotero Connector is the official branding. Oh, connector. Can we be sponsored by Zotero? Are they still at George Mason? Is that where they are? There was some, what was the Zotero news recently?

I forget. Did they get money or move or something? Yeah, I think they had some sort of collab with someone. Yeah, people were excited, but I haven't used Zotero in a while because I filled mine up and was using it for like everything. I can help you with that. There's a really good plug-in. It's called also Managing Your Shit Better. Yeah, you just have to have the PDFs rerouted to another folder and do links instead of actually having it store your files.

But then you put your PDF folder in the cloud too. So you can still, that's how you do it. And you use a Zot file and it automatically moves things for you and renames them. It's great. Shout out to whoever made Zon file. Yeah, Zotero's sweet like that because it, because it's open source, they have all those sick add-ons like that. This plug-ins rule. It's great.

I'd be curious to see some sort of data on Zotero uptake versus decrease in number of article downloads. I don't use Zotero to store any PDFs, but I guess people that do, you don't have to repeatedly go back to the article page and redownload it. Yeah. Yeah.

It's really nice. Yeah. It's probably not significant. But speaking of article downloads, AJ, you came on. The reason we're all here. Another one. And you get a single ham horn. You, am I allowed to talk about the article?

Let's do it. Let's get into it. So you have an article forthcoming, which you gave me a preview to, about your read and let read presentation that you did at Library Publishing Forum this year, which I will link to both the slides. And then when the paper comes out, we'll link to that. It is. So you start with Dave Grimaldi, friend of the pod,

his critique of so-called transformative agreements, language that I've been taking up as well. Good for the groups who sign them, bad for the overall system. They mostly have prestige for the universities that have enough money to get the attention for a transformative agreement and also play the prestige game enough. that they want the open access citation advantages? Yes, yes, all those things.

Yes. They avoid the free writer problem, which is not a problem. It's just that universities don't understand what a public good is anymore. In that they only work for the biggest systems. They extract extra money from universities. And that OA, that free writer problem, which is that, oh, if we have articles that are open access, other people aren't going to have to pay for them. So the logic here is that big universities will just pay more.

But in paying more, they're doing it for prestige, which also generates new capital. Yeah, so free-rider problem is just what we call public goods in a neoliberal academy, doing anything that benefits of the universities for no direct benefit at the host institution. And that's why OA is now somewhat attractive to the largest universities because they can cement their place at the top. And one of Dave's big critiques of this is that even though this is open access, people can read, it doesn't allow the interchange of information between the Imperial Corps and underdeveloped nations. So there's no dialogue happening. There's no actual, it's more cultural hegemony. It's everyone can read the stuff put out by the Imperial Corps countries that have the most money.

And that's it. And so everyone is going to be deriving. their next studies from that and citing them more, which is important. Yeah, I kind of read it like open access. This is open access 1.0, kind of in the same way that the web 1.0 was read only. And then web, was it 2.0 or 1.5? Yeah, 2.0. It's read right.

So we need to get to an open access. That's more 2.0 where you can read and write. You're free to do to do both of those things. Speaking a friend of the pod, Dave, Gamondi, I have to just give him a second shout out. His TA's so-called transformative agreements, it's one of those things that have been out there and people in positions of power have been dealing with them

and it's been on my radar, but I've not had to dig into it. Dave put out that paper on Humanities Commons, and it was like, okay, I have to pay attention to this now. So I have to thank Dave for kind of, forcing my eyeballs onto the topic. One of the big things that came out of both the UC deal, I think that was maybe the flashpoint for transformative agreements, for a certain sect of person that includes myself,

it was kind of a big, flashy, here's UC, a huge institution that has been doing hard-nosed negotiations with Elsevier, and they went so far as to walk away. And they came back and this is what they came back with. And then that's when Dave releases paper when I had to pay attention to it. The thing that I took out of the critique of open access, Justin, you were joking earlier that, oh, A, you can, you don't have to do a lot of prep when you do an episode on open access because nothing ever changes. But the thing that maybe cemented more in my head through that was that open access is not good at any cost, at all cost.

And so that really submitted that in my head. I know that was like an open access theme of open access week theme for Spark. And that's an idea that's been out there. But that's really when it's submitted in my head that open access is great, but it's not like great at any and all cost. So to get to the reason why we're here is my paper, obviously. So read and let it read. So the opposite, it seemed to me, must be true.

If open access is not good at any cost, maybe subscription journals are kind of okay at some cost. So this is what, I guess I'll launch into what Read and Let Read is. This is a plan, this is a proposal that I have for schools, for institutions like UC with a lot of, with a lot of money behind them that may be considering a transformational agreement or are currently in one. So a transformational agreement is we're going to pay X amount of money to make sure, to ensure that our authors are able to publish open access through the payment route system, through the APC. And as we talked about, that's got a lot of problems when it comes to inequity, because that means all these authors' articles are free to read,

but authors at systems that don't have that kind of power, they're not going to be able to do that same sort of thing. So the read and let read deal is, well, let's take a look at what you want to get for your system. And let's think about how you want to, how you want to affect the larger ecosystem of research and how we can kind of marry those two things. Because I do, I think I have a lot of sympathy for the people that you see that signed, that negotiated this deal. They have a lot of people they need to please. They're looking at their at their librarians and there's faculty who want open access and they're looking at their faculty who want else of your articles and they're trying to thread that needle.

So I appreciate what they're what they're trying to do. And I think you can still do that without all the inequity part. So I don't have my, oh man, I don't have my paper in front of me. So I'll do this from my head. I think, what is it? You see in a year, it's calculating. that they download, what is it, 5.5 million articles? Does that sound right? Yep. Also, there's a link to your paper in the notes. Thank you so much. I should click on that link and look at it.

So the thought was, if you want to get roughly 5.5 million article downloads for your people at your system, and you also want to open access, not open access, if you want to increase access of readership for the wide world, and you want to do this without inequity, with less inequity, excuse me, then let's start paying for the article downloads and do this kind of like a financial instrument where for every article that you're paying for, for your system, at a valuation of 50 cents, let's also buy a second article, a prepaid article access, token or whatever, that would be free to anybody. So I think you see their current deals somewhere in the 10.7 million range.

If you know you've got 5.5 articles that you were people want, pay 50 cents for those, prepay those, and prepay for 5.5 million other article downloads. And in the next year, you can pretty much guarantee every UC faculty member, student, whoever is going to get access to the number of articles that they're accustomed to, and you're also going to be providing the same amount of article access to the rest of the world. So it's not open access, but it is access that is not being paid by the end user. So it's kind of like a sneaky, temporary

diamond or platinum open access it's not open access Justin delete that last 15 seconds this is not open access it's open trash can it's open trash can and we want all the raccoons to have access to all the trash that they need

I think a thing I like about this model is that because the thing that bugs me about so many of our open access models is that at the end of the day, like, all the money is still, like, money is still exchanging hands and stuff.

It's just who's providing it. And it's all just still going to Elsevier at the end of the day or whatever other vendor, which, like, let's be real, Lusiville is just going to buy everyone. Yeah. Like, who are they? It's like Elsevier, is it Springer

one? I'm not a Skollcom person, obviously. But like, it's all just still going to them. And so open access, like, sometimes like I don't really know who open access is benefiting, especially with these large transformative agreements. And the thing that I like about your model is that it, instead of just being like, oh, well, these specific articles by these specific professors at our university are going to be open access. Here you go. It just makes articles like open, open, first. or like, and I'm assuming this would sort of apply across the board, like with whatever vendor you're set up with.

And then people who aren't at your university or something can, like, where it's not limited to just specific researchers and what they write. I think an ideal system for me would mean that then like people get paid for writing. If money is going to be exchanging hands, stop getting it to Elsevier. But yeah, because like I feel like a lot of the open access agreements we see are just sort of. they're not really changing much of anything. They sort of are touting themselves as being these, like, you know, kind of radical and progressive and like, oh, we're making information free to access and isn't this great.

When it's still just like working within a system. So it's like if we have to work within a system, if we can't just radically stop giving else severe money overnight, like yours seems like a sort of midway between let's stop giving else severe your money and let's give them money in a way that makes us look good, kind of. I don't know if I'm being coherent at all, but yeah, it seems like a good way of like working within the system without trying to be something it's not if that makes sense. Like if we have to have the system right now, then this seems like a good way to do it instead

of trying to be like, oh, we're open access now, get it? And it's not really doing much of anything for anyone. I hope that wink translated onto audio. Yes, for people who can't see I winked. No, I think you're getting at, uh, that was coherent and you're getting to points that I, that I'm hoping would be understood with this, is that, yes, you're still going to give money to Elsevier and we, you, you see it. Like if you're like, exactly, if you're not going to step away and step away forever, you're going to give them money. So let's think about, Within that confine, within those confines, what's the best way we can go about this? And I understand that it's a lot of money and you still want to make sure that you're benefiting your constituents at UC or whatever system you're at, more so than anybody else.

But you also want to do this thing that looks good. Yeah. So, you know, a lot of it is, like as you're talking about the capital exchange of money for product, right? Right. So much of this is like the paying model has always been like this print-based paying model essentially where you're paying for readership. And that has had a huge impact on our serials buying models essentially. But with digital models that has shifted copyright and access and we're still using print-based access models and print-based capitalist exchange model. And so some of the same, you know, I guess I read some work that has suggested the paradigm shift B towards open access B that like in open access models, the institution then starts paying for providing access to things where it puts, they take on the onus for knowledge production, the financial onus for knowledge production, which I thought was interesting, which at that point, like what purpose does.

does the fucking publisher serve at that point? Because under the readership model, the publisher served a purpose. And the publisher took under that purpose to provide readership. But if the purpose is to provide access to a population, broadly speaking, through, you know, whatever interface you want to, access to knowledge, and you want to take on that cost that you could be paying for journals, but unfortunately, so much of the ownership of knowledge

has been locked up now because of ownership issues in academic journals. I think that speaks to the problem that we have now. Does that make sense? Yeah, I think so. I'm going to throw something out here, Carrie, and maybe, or anyone,

you all might respond to this. I've had this phrase floating in my, had kind of during the writing of this, which was pay unto Elsevier. What is Elsevere's? Yeah. I just feel like I don't believe we need to be trying to flip Elsevere journal articles to open access through the paid route. I don't believe we need to be flipping their journals. If a journal has been started by Elsevier that shows us that they have the know-how and the will to do so. And we can, you know, for every journal that we flip,

they can just create a new one. For every article we flip through the paid route, you know, next year, several million more articles are going to be published. And that's going to happen regardless. So just trying, what I'm trying to do in this policy is just get at some cost efficiencies. So I think it was Rick Anderson and Scarley Communications.

No, Scarly Kitchen. His estimate was that the average... His estimate would be that the APCs for UC under their current deal would be $2,449. And so, like, that's cheaper than other APCs, but that's still wildly too much to be paying for any single article. I understand it's great that it's your UC people that you want to flip these articles for, but do you feel like that's a good cost? Like if you, under a read-and-let-read deal, if you said, okay, we're going to put 5.5 million free prepaid uses out into the world, you know, that's 50 cents per article access. Do you think that every article that UC publishes is going to be downloaded that many times? Or the other way to look at it is I know UC does a pretty good job of doing green deposits on their articles.

And they have a lot of stuff that gets published. And how do you decide, how do you tackle which articles you go with first? Well, what if you, you know, first 12 months, let's say a 12-month embargo, you let the subscription article fly, you give people access at this very affordable and prepaid rate. And at the end of the year, when you see which articles are doing numbers, that's where you focus your attention on next year to flip them to green. That's another thing I have great that I do applaud UC on in their explanation.

Justin, I think you were in that same spark meeting where it was a representative from UC that was explaining their deal. And they were saying, like, this transformative, so-called transformative agreement, that's just one piece. That's just one part of our arsenal for open access. They were talking about all the other things they do. I think they host, what is it, Earth Archive. They do a number of other things that support open access. And this really is just one more way to give access. And so I just think, I think on this final point, there's just a better, there's got to be a better way.

Yeah. So before we get into the weeds too much, I wanted to make sure everyone sort of understands the read and let read model. So the way the public access tokens work, so UC would pay for, it estimates it's going to have 11 million downloads of Elsevier articles. So it will pay for 22 million downloads. It will pay for 22 million tokens. It will use all of those 11 million or it could use 12 million, and then it would have whatever the remainder go to the public. So some immediate problems that I'm seeing with the model is a university doesn't understand what a public good is. And also who is the public?

Is it going to be Californians? Is it going to be California tax dollars? Is it going to be United States? Is it going to be global? I see that as an immediate problem that neoliberal universities are going to have. The second problem I see is they're not going to pay for double what they need. but I could see them paying like 1.1 times as many downloads as they need, 1.2 times, which is good because this stabilizes the price.

You don't want to just pay as you go because if your enrollment drops, then you have less money and then your usage goes up and all kinds of things that would fuck with library budgets that no one wants to deal with. So that makes, I think you could probably talk them into a certain amount of additional buys as long as it kept like the contract stable, which I think is what Elsevier wants to, because I don't think Elsevier cares about cost per use. They care about steady incomes from large universities.

So it doesn't matter how much it actually costs them to make an article or how much it costs to host them or anything like that. They're just worried about having consistent income from multiple universities, which there are some good things out there that could make this work in terms of pricing transparency. So, for instance, Spark is collecting as many open contracts as possible so people know how much is your university paying? And once we all know what each other are paying, then you could actually make an argument of, okay, 50 cents a download, 45 cents a download. That would get easier. I think this model does save universities a lot of administrative overhead because labor is expensive.

So the thing that we talked about with Dave, and the thing that was so disappointing about the UC agreement finally coming in was it creates this absolutely insane system of paying for APCs, which is you get a 10% discount. So you've got to tell them I'm a UC author. And then the first $1,000 is covered by the library and the rest is supposed to come from the grant's office. So that's a faculty member, a library staff member, and a grant's office staff member walk into a bar, and they all get paid and they all have benefits. And then if there's not grant money, then the library picks up the rest. I don't know where this extra money comes from, but I guess that's UC's problem. And all of this labor could go away on the university side if you say, okay, let's buy 1.2 times the amount of downloads we need. So I could see that being like a huge selling point to someone like UC.

I think the people who would have the most problem with this would be El Sivir saying our articles aren't worth 50 cents a download. They're worth $1.25 a download or $36 a download, whatever they cost now. Or zero if you use the Sihub plugin extension that will be linked in the show notes. Or bookmark led. Yeah. So I think you had two points that bookended that maybe contradict. I think you had said that you think El Sivir doesn't care. what their cost per use is, but then also on the other end of it that they would bristle at

this sort of valuation. And so I want the deal that I'm presenting here would actually give them more money than they're receiving now. So I feel like from that standpoint, they would be okay with the, maybe be okay with the bargain because they're getting more money than they are currently, and they would potentially get even more money in the future depending on if, demand for usage increases. So if people at UC start using the articles more, than the next year UC is going to pay more. And I think you did have a good critique about this deal and that how do you convince UC to take it on? So I think two different routes on that. The first one is if you kind of think about the tokens as a financial instrument, so to speak, if you said, instead of,

I'm going to buy one token for us and then one or two one token for them. If instead you said you're paying for one token and what this token does, let's say let's call it a dollar. This token gives a usage for UC and a usage for other people. So what you see would see is what you see would see. What you see would see is that their ability to access articles doesn't change. and they're able to give equal access to the rest of the world. And the second sort of way that I would maybe frame this to people at UC,

and I'm going to go on a little bit of a tangent, but there's been a little bit of discourse about different ways that you define green access or gold access or diamond access. And what a lot of people do when they try to describe those things, rather than say, like, no, it's not actually diamond, it's platinum or whatever, it's bronze, like when you talk to your faculty members, you just describe what it is that the thing does. So if you simply, if you, instead of saying we, we want open access at all costs, if you say we want to increase access for people outside of our walls, under that expanded

definition, rather than saying open access, just access that is open, you are accomplishing that. No, I mean, yeah, that makes perfect sense in terms of what UC is trying to sell and trying to get out of it in terms of prestige. It is a contradiction that Elsevier would both bristle at having 50 cents per valuation and also be fine getting paid that, but contradictions abound. I just think, like, they would say, like, they just wouldn't want you to say that part out loud, probably. But, you know, I think, I think from a negotiating standpoint, that's just the way they, I've been going to those spark negotiations webinars. And so it's all very like Sun Su business bro stuff. So I can imagine they just don't actually want to talk about like how much. No one wants their labor given that kind of like money value.

But anyway, it saves a whole lot of overhead. It works good in this one sense. I was also thinking we talked about. you know, national problems. Because once these things start to scale, like UC could probably do a pilot of a project like this, which would be really cool to see how it plays out in the real world. But then once you start scaling it, like, what if Texas does this?

What if everyone else does this? And I mean, eventually you just get the point where, like, why don't we just nationalize these things? It's absolutely crazy. But India had an interesting proposal, which was one country, one subscription. So you don't have to nationalize it, because quite honestly,

who can nationalize a multinational corporation these days anyway. He would have to have the pure strength of will of the Cuban people to do that. And I just don't think the Netherlands has that. So, yeah, like one country, one subscription makes a whole lot of sense. Like, if you're just going to be paying all this anyway, I think the United States would never go for that. But it leads you into weird areas, like, immediately, when you're talking about these sums of money and these amounts of access and things like that.

would a state-based model then for the United States maybe be because I feel like the United States is just like 50 countries in a trench coat altogether it's like yeah probably couldn't nationalize a subscription to Elsevier but like hey if you know a whole university a state university system's going to do why not just have the entire state do it doesn't seem like too much of a leap I mean Texas got really close to this with our with our negotiation group because pretty much every university in Texas was like, okay, we'll renegotiate. But then it's still like individual contracts by university, whereas if the state of Texas just bought one subscription, which is impossible because we have like six university systems. Like we can't even get one university system. It's absolutely wild here. I don't even know how many systems we have. It's five or six. I always forget. Yeah, I think a state-based model would actually work pretty well, like one state, one subscription. Iowa actually did something like this when I was there. We had the Iowa Academic Library Association,

which we had basically a cereals buying group that we decided to go in and use some consortial power to negotiate a contract. We put out an RFP and got like some pretty good proposals because previously we just had some things kind of negotiated through the State Library and then through the private academic libraries that had some consortial purchasing power. But really, like, the academic libraries kind of pulled it together and, like, put together, like, a whole package of things of several different databases that we had as a, you know,

opt-in sort of, like, base package that, you know, you buy into for X amount of dollars or like was you know pretty much affordable for almost every academic library i don't want to speak for everyone because i don't remember it that well because anyway but yeah that was a thing that iowa did and like quite a few other um states have done similar things where they have you know a state-based database package that most of their academic libraries um will opt into or like will provide and even like state libraries have a base database package that they provide for free to every public library and every academic library. Yeah, and Texas does have like the higher education coordinating board.

So it's not impossible when you're talking about consortia. It is more coordinated than I gave it credit. I'm going to look up that thing in Iowa though. So while we're we still have some time, AJ, you I and Dave got into a really long thread during the week of the library publishing forum, which for me conflated like a lot of things that didn't actually happen at the forum. It was just things we talked about in this thread that went on for a really long time about what kind of alternative models we could have for what Jay mentioned, which was libraries sort of taking back the labor of publishing a little bit more.

Or was it Carrie? Now I'm doubting myself who mentioned this. But anyway, how could libraries start doing the labor of publishing again. And we were talking about consortial models in terms of doing something. I'm writing a book chapter about this right now with some people from Texas Digital Library, where we're talking about what kind of infrastructure do you need and then what kind of publishing programs you build on top of it. And my argument was, more or less, you could take something like the Texas Digital Library model, add a few people, to do editorial services on top of it and help universities that aren't going to build their own journal publishing and do something similar to what Iowa State did, or at least gave us some

background information on, which was when the Journal of Scholarly Communication, was it Journal of JLSC, Journal of Librarianship Scholar Communications? Anyway, when they migrated over to Iowa State University, we got a peek at their finances, and so they estimated it cost $10,000 a year to run, which is, you know, compared to like, that's like four APCs. And you get to run a really high quality journal. And what I was saying is if you have these consortia and you make determinations about what's going to get funded, we can't have all these passion projects where everyone's working for free and everyone's, you know, putting out one issue a year, which is like most

of the journals I work with at my university. But we were to get some journals and just like, I was thinking in like librarianship, If you could get like three journals that focus on, say metadata that aren't that big, say, hey, combine your editorial boards, combine your processes, combine your journal, and we will give you $10,000 a year for copy editing and all this other stuff, that we can't provide at the consortia level. And I think that's a pretty scalable model. And what I found out recently is Texas Digital Library isn't the only place doing

consortia-based publishing. Ontario is also doing this with Scholar Portal. So this is something I only recently found out, but they have a surprisingly similar model that they've worked out. So it seems like something that's appearing organically that I think if we threw a little more money behind and tried expanding with a little more staffing, we could get some really interesting results.

Yeah, yeah. I like the idea of consolidating particular journals that are very much on the same subject or roughly on the same subject. And I would just say leave space for, you do want to have a few passion projects out there. There's, you know, the disciplines, they do that interdisciplinary thing quite a bit and they want to get a, you know, a journal off the ground. Maybe they don't have to do like a full, longstanding run, maybe just a few special editions to say this is a thing. and maybe they get swallowed up in one of the other journals. But we use Digital Commons here at Murray State.

Am I biting my tongue saying my institution out loud? We were on Digital Commons pre the Elsevier buyout. And the thing that always kind of sticks with me is that while Elsevier bought it, it still functions the same. And if you could do, like you're saying, Justin, just anything along those lines that, like, what it felt like we were doing, library publishing should be not hard, right? I'm at a tiny school.

I'm one person. We have four journals that were basically born here. It shouldn't be hard. The infrastructure, like you were saying with SciHub, you could start a new SciHub today. So, like, a lot of times I feel like just need another. Digital Commons, like a, I mean, I guess that's D-Space. But if you had a library-owned version of Digital Commons or whatever you're working on right now in Texas, I think that's a completely viable alternative option. And I think that's the thing that we need to really focus on providing

is alternative options to Elsevier. I did a little digging into how new journals are born at Elsebier, and they've had quite a few born. And sometimes they go out and look for editors to start something. But a lot of times it's editors that are saying, we want to start this journal. We just need to make that pitch. We just need to increase the pitch. Yeah, I think that's right. Yeah, I don't see why they couldn't do that to a consortium model.

Yeah, Texas Digital Library is basically like that you subscribe to it as an institution. You become an institutional member. and then whatever services you get on top of that. So if you want a D-Space instance spun up for you and maintained for you, that's $5,000 a year, it's much cheaper than Digital Commons. And you could do the same thing with Open Journal systems, OJS. You can spin up a lot of those. There's some technical debt issues and stuff like that.

You don't want to modify. You don't want too many customizations. But, yeah, that model is already there. I think if you just expanded it in a couple specific strategic ways, you could really get high-quality publishing done at consortial level for just a fraction of what we're paying Elsevier to outsource. And there's much more editorial control and there's much more. You get to do all the things that we think are interesting to do,

like paying peer reviewers or paying authors even. Or if you have the money in a certain way, you get to run the project the way you want to run it. And some of them have to find their own funding and stuff like that. but the copy editing, the DOIs. I mean, some consortia can cover the DOIs. For Texas Digital Library doesn't. Scholar Portal does.

So it seems like there's ways to do it. And I think like Director of Open Access Journals is now even minting DOIs for everybody. So there's got to be ways to do this at scale where everyone doesn't have to be minting their own DLIs. Unfortunately, that's a position I'm in. So we have a cross-ref membership, which is extremely cheap. But it's just labor I don't want to do because if I leave, someone's got to take over that membership. Someone's got to have to log in and all this stuff and make sure they're keeping up the

DOIs and everything. So it's kind of a technical debt that I really didn't want to take on. But and like you're saying with the passion projects, you can't, I wasn't saying like you have to stop them. Like you can't stop them. Like they're still going to keep going on. They're going to run journals based in WordPress. But I'm saying don't give them $10,000 a year.

you give the $10,000 a year to journals that are agreeing to consolidate and take on roughly as many quality publications as they receive. So they can still keep all their standards. They can reject as many articles as they want, but they'll be able to publish as many quality up to standard articles as they receive. I think that's like, you know, max efficiency. That's what you want. You want every good article to find a home. I feel bad.

It's been like a very joke light episode. I feel like I've deprived the audience of... Usually, like, it comes in in the middle and it happens. I've already put some notes to myself about, like, when you were listing off like green, gold, platinum, I put a note to get the Pokemon intro music while you're talking. So I'll make sure I edit that in and post. I'm surprised they didn't put this in.

I try not to talk about open access too much because then I just go. And I don't want, no one wants to listen to me. No, see, the, the topic itself is a joke. Of, oh, let's, you know, just the whole scholarly communication scheme is a racket. So that's the joke. See, we're very clever. Jay just got joker-fied about open access.

See, it's all a big joke. I still haven't seen Joker, but I have seen Taxi Driver, and that's like the same thing, right? Yeah, basically. We research in an ecosystem. Although I did hear that the score for Joker was very good. And like a woman did it. It's like all on cello or something. It won the Oscar.

Yeah. Yeah. I've seen her at the Knoxville Art Museum. Yeah, I've heard it's worth watching just for the score, if anything. You could also just listen to it. Yeah, but you know, it was meant to go with the movie. No, not really. She can just make music.

I sometimes just, like, if I hear that a movie has a good score and I don't want to listen, watch the movie, I don't watch the movie. The Green Night Score was very good. That's what I heard. There's like Middle English folk songs in it. I was like, oh, I read that one. So it's very fun. You could also watch the Woman Joker movie. Cruella.

Oh, God. That was a grilly fun time on Twitter when people were just sharing the video of her mom just staring and then getting pushed off a thing by Dowellations. I still want to watch that movie just because it's so dumb. I watched, I think I tapped out like three, two-thirds through. Yeah. I just couldn't. Is it that bad? It's, I mean, it's not a good movie.

Like, I don't think anyone expected it to be. but it just also wasn't like bad in of a good way. I like that one actor in it. I heard he was good in it. Like the guy who was in, um, is it mind hunter or whatever that one show was? I think he's like the guy who plays jasper.

Everyone's like he's the hot one or something. The like little gay assistant guy. I don't know if his character's gay, but he looks gay. Oh, I don't know. So I have no idea. I have ingested very little discourse about Cruella. and I tried to avoid it about Joker.

It's just like, you know what, just watch the movie. If you like it, you like it. Movies can be interesting and not good. Like we were talking about comics the other day. There are comics that are not good comics, but they are very interesting executions on the form. I saw a review for, what's the movie that's on HBO Max? The Suicide Squad?

I just want to go full the social network and be like, drop the, it's cleaner. It's cleaner. but we already have that movie. Apparently that one's bad too. I saw a Lights Action Jackson Review, and then at the end it said Rapid Review, and I was like, wait a minute, that's...

Like an article type, that's what I do. That's my job. Y'all want a rapid review? Here's some methodology. I wish people could see the little gesture that Kerry just did. It was like a wizard. If we record a video, it would desync so bad. It would be so bad.

But, AJ asked if we were ever going to do like a video version. If I do, if I can ever work out that, that, well, there's your problem episode. Then maybe we'll have slides one time. I promise to post pictures of what I wear when we do the leather archives episode. That counts right. their Instagram is fun. I think I had said to Justin offline, just how envious I am that he has access to this podcast. I just, I think about all the half, half baked ideas that I get for a writing project.

And it could have just been like, you know, a 10 minute segment on a podcast and I wouldn't have to wait, waste six months in my life writing something and revising something. You just say it and people hear it. And there you go. Yep. Although I am a sucker and I got suckered into like three writing projects this year. So I'm still writing stuff that I feel like could have been a podcast, especially the metadata one I'm working on. But that's, it's for people who aren't librarians. So it can be very baby's first metadata.

This, this, this paper could have been a podcast. I'm just going to say, I'm like, I wonder how much like stuff, uh, like. This meeting should have been an email. This paper could have been a podcast episode. This podcast should have been a thought in your head. It could have been a tweet. Everyone's ever going to cite our podcast. That would be fun. Carrie Wade said fuck.

Citation needed. Yeah, so one of those two guys in Australia, they have their podcast that they use DOIs. They put them all on OSF, so they get DOL. and they can get cited. Oh, I love that. I keep, I don't want my job interfering with this podcast at all. I don't want to ever like, same. I, that's why we record off hours.

And that's why I'm not at work today also. I mean, I was off work anyway. I'm too much of a rascal. Yeah, I'd rather have fun. We were talking, this didn't get recorded yesterday, but we're talking with Matthew yesterday about bad library podcasts. And I feel like if this was work related, it would become a bad library podcast. Oh, definitely.

It would be boring. And you couldn't say fuck as much. And we couldn't do a whole episode about Sean Connery and Christian Slater and hurling twinks out of windows. Connell Fabish. Connell Fabish. It's like he's here. I can almost hear his voice. Is Sean Connery dead?

Yes. This was a running joke we had for like 10 years before he died. So whenever someone brought up Sean Connery, my friend would go, RIP Sean Connery and we would all sit there for a second and go what he did like last year a couple years ago and then he finally actually died and ruined the joke Oh what a bastard I'm sorry he ruined your joke by dying It's not very considerate RIP your sense of humor just Oh this is what I expect from this podcast

I'm glad you say that as a drop I saw that you posted that on Twitter before you release the episode So I'm excited for people to hear that it was because we were talking about titties. I wonder, I'm like, I wonder what Matthew said that about. I deleted that in the group chat afterwards because I didn't want to look at it anymore. Yeah, I saw it. I was like, where's the awful comic cover go?

Yeah. So anyway, it's usually the end of the episode where we stopped talking about whatever we were here to talk about and talk about movies. Yeah. That's fair. I'm going to go see a movie tonight What are you going to see? I'm going to go see the Alvin Ailey documentary

that premiered at Sundance earlier this year. Yeah, there's a little screening room and Newburyport Mass that's like 45 minutes away. So, going to go to like, going to go do that. My brain filled in real quick and you said Alvin and my head just went and the chipmunks. Alvin! No, I'm...

Speaking of chipmunks, did you hear about the chipmunks? carrying the bubonic plague at Lake Tahoe. What? Yeah. The literal bubonic plague? What? Yeah, they find that kind of, the plague pops up here and there. Yeah, it's so great.

I love sticking around. How'd the chipmunks get it? It's called zoonotic illness. Mm-hmm. Like, rats get it, humans get it, it transfers between species. So when humans and chipmunks live together, Dave, that's what you get. Yeah. Yeah.

You and the chipmunks living together. It's a cautionary tale, Alvin and the chipmunks. Alvin. Yeah. Don't let three chipmunks you live with have a music career. I think was the moral of the story. Yes. I don't actually remember.

I just had the Christmas tape as a kid. That was my only. I didn't ever watch the show. I had the record of it. Oh, sweet. And so like it's supposed to be played at 33 RPM, 33 and third RPM, right? My little ass cranked it to 45 and they were extra chipmunky. I was like, this is awesome.

And I listened to that year round, just like mega chipmunky. Whenever I hear people talk about Alvin and Chipmunks on vinyl, it's always like, they slow it down and they hear the human voices, but you're going in the opposite direction. You went more. I went more chipmunk. Hyper chickmunk. Hyper chipmunk. More chipmunk.

What if I did this and slow this down a lot? What would that sound like? I do have a preset on my soundboard. It's just called chipmunk. I couldn't understand like any of that. But yeah, there's like, oh, I could. I don't speak chipmunk apparently I'm

I mean like I was like three years old listening to like the chipmunks on 45 That's how you learn the English Yeah What do you think I talk so fucking fast Yeah So that's a personal story about myself

It's very delightful And I'm glad I know this about you I do sometimes because I auto-shorten silences as part of my editing so that there aren't like it saves like seven minutes or something. I do sometimes want to put like zero milliseconds between them and just have like a like a Gilmore Girls episode where we're just all talking on top of each other. No. I thought it would be very funny.

I do too. It's so bad. I had a, I dated a guy who was really into it one time and I watched them like no one's that funny in real life. Like this is just. No, they're not even funny. Exactly. They just think they're really.

funny. It's like the Aaron Sorkin, Joss Whedon type of dialogue where you're not writing the way that people actually talk. You write so that people think that you, the writer, or clever. It's just a big walk-and-talk episode. Yeah. Like we're on. Oh, we're doing a walk-and-tuck? We're doing a walk-and-track? I think about Larry David. Oh, we're doing a walk-and-tuck, you know? I just, I hate, I'm one of those people I tried watching Buffy, and I'm like, no, I can't do this. I hate Josh Whedon's dialogue too much. The only one of the only time I like Just Being dialogue is in the first Avengers movie, which is actually a quite good action movie. And that's the only time his dialogue has ever fucking worked for me. And with Sorkin, like, with the social network, that's because David Vintra was like, okay, Aaron, go do your own thing now. And then, like, made it better. Apparently Aaron Sorken, like, made like a whole little separate movie because Dave Fincher was like, okay, go do your own shooting and stuff. That'll be fun, right? You can basically tell where there's Aaron Sorkin in that movie. Yeah. It's like a very obvious, like, he basically just wrote the Jesse Eisenberg parts.

Yeah, and that's why it's so insufferable and perfect. It's a good movie. I should rewatch it soon. Have you watched anything good lately, AJ? Oh, man. No, I don't think so. I don't know. I think I tried to watch a movie the other night and I took a Benadryl before, and I don't know.

That sounds delightful. I finally watched Crash on Tuesday. The good one or the bad one? The good one. Okay. Although now I kind of want to do a crash double feature of Crash and Crash. Just to do it. Yeah, it was very good.

You know what's funny about Crash is they both have sexually charged scenes that happen at a car accident. Yeah, it's true. Really? Yeah. involving cars. I also learned that there's like a 9-11 version of crash where it happens where it's like not the horny pervert crash, but the movie that beat Brokeback Mountain at the Oscars crash. That there's like a 9-11 version of that where it's basically that movie, but it's all happening to people who are in the Twin Towers. And I'm like, oh, so.

9-11 movies are just a losing prospect. It's so weird. I saw today there was a Disney promo for America, I guess, post 9-11. It was like all the child actors talking about like the flag and how great it was. And I remember like immediately in the aftermath of 9-11, like we were weirdly united. But it's so embarrassing to watch the Disney Channel characters do it. And so when you think about like how polarized we are today, it's like, Well, look at the alternative.

Yeah. I'm glad I didn't watch the Disney channel now. I watched Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network. I didn't do any of that Mickey Mouse bullshit. Yeah. It's very hard to explain to young people what post-9-11 was like. Like all of the flags. Yeah.

I've been like, because all the podcasts I listen to are people in their 30s. So they're always talking about, like, if they talk about 9-11 stuff, they're like, it's so impossible to explain how nuts this was. Yeah. I really liked Lindsay Ellis's. She's got a couple videos on, she's got like a depictions of 9-11 in film video, but she's also got this really good one about Spielberg's War the Worlds as a 9-11 movie,

which is really good because, I mean, that's what that movie is. And the video sort of talks about how 9-11 changed our cinematic landscape. Like that's when we started getting grim, dark stuff. And then she also came out with a video on, like, Bush era music, like how our music landscape changed during the Bush era. And, of course, like, Toby Keith comes up, you know, because of 9-11, put a boot in your ass, kind of the jingoistic country takeover that happened. You mean jingoistic.

Is it not jingoistic? It's jingoistic? Jingoistic. Jingoistic is when Quentin Tarantino makes a movie about slavery. Jingoistic? Jingoistice. Jingo, okay. My kids have busted into my wife's old CD collection.

Of course, the Spider-Man soundtrack is in there. Oh, my God, yes. My brother had that. There was that Chad Kroger song, A Hero Will Save Us. Yeah. Oh, like the first late, Toby McGuire, Spider-Man? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah.

But it's Uber patriotic. Oh, yeah. That came on. And, like, it was the first time I heard it in a decade plus. And it was for a brief moment, I got a little chill. I was like, shit, America. Yeah. You need a hero.

America. Fuck, yeah. Yeah. Also, 9-11 connection with that movie. They had to cut out a scene of the Twin Towers in the production of that movie. Yeah, in the trailer, one of the original trailers for it had a big web between the two towers because it came out. that movie came out either in 2001 or 2002. 2002.

Yeah. Because my brother was a sophomore in high school, and he was, like, all in on, like, he learned how to tie a tie with a Spider-Man tie. Sweet. And, like, it was a big deal, because he was all in on Spider-Man. I just always think about what a fucking game-changer the Spider-Man kiss was.

You know, Spider-Man coming down from between the Twin Towers, giving Mary Jane a kiss. That's the crash movie you were talking about. Yes. And with that, library punk is out. This is the second time we've talked extensively about 9-11. So, I mean... Oh, yeah.

That episode. Yeah. We talked about the 9-11 museum. Luckily, America triumphed, and we built a giant mall on top of the Twin Towers, with no seating. Capitalism. Because that's how we thrive.

It shows that we're not afraid. We're resilient like that. Freedom. Ain't free. Well, AJ, where can people find you? Or do you want them to leave you alone? Anything else you want to plug? Yeah, you can find me at Twitter.com slash AJ slash, no, underscore Boston.

I guess that'll be in the show notes, right? Yeah. Yeah. go find my articles, cite them, et cetera. I don't think I've ever been cited. I just want to note that publicly. I've been cited for something that was not an original thought of mine. They cited like my article,

but they were citing something that I was citing from someone else. Was it like an undergrad? Doing a research project? No, no, no. This is like a report that someone was doing in like Ireland on web archiving. And somehow that got picked up by Google Scholar. So I have an H&D. of one now.

Nice. Well, thank you all for having me on the show. It was a great delight. I appreciate you all taking time out of your normal podcasting schedule to accommodate my weird needs. But this is a, this is delight, a blast. Great show. Keep it up.

Five out of five stars. Thank you. Okay. So depending on when I finish editing this, good night.