NOTE: This is an unedited verbatim transcript of the Symposium on Electronic Scientific, Technical, and Medical Publishing and its Implications prepared by CASET Associates and is not an official report of The National Academies or of the Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy. Opinions and statements included in the transcript are solely those of the individual persons or participants at the symposium, and are not necessarily adopted or endorsed or verified as accurate by The National Academies.

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THE NATIONAL ACADEMIES
COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE, ENGINEERING AND PUBLIC POLICY

SYMPOSIUM ON ELECTRONIC SCIENTIFIC, TECHNICAL AND
MEDICAL JOURNAL PUBLISHING AND ITS IMPLICATIONS

May 20, 2003
The National Academies
2100 C Street, N.W.
Washington, D.C.

Proceedings By:
CASET Associates, Ltd.
10201 Lee Highway, Suite 160
Fairfax, Virginia 22030
(703)352-0091

* * *

PROCEEDINGS

(8:35 am)

Agenda Item: Welcoming Remarks - Bruce Alberts, President, National Academy of Sciences

DR. ALBERTS: Good morning. I'm Bruce Alberts, the president of the National Academy of Sciences for the last 10 years. It's a pleasure for me to be here to welcome you to our home.

Unfortunately, I came back from Cleveland last night, got on an airplane, and I got a very bad cold. Traveling is not much fun. So, I may not be too coherent this morning, but fortunately, I'll be brief.

Let me just say a word about the academy, because I know not all of you are familiar. We got a charter as a private, independent organization existing in Washington, DC from Abraham Lincoln's Congress in 1863, which said we could exist as an honorary association of the nation's best scientists, at least that was the way it was supposed to be.

But to do that, we had an obligation, and that is the academy shall, whenever called upon by an department of the government, investigate, examine, and report upon any subject of science or art -- art actually meant technology in those days. But here is the catch, the academy shall receive no compensation whatsoever for any services to the government of the United States.

We had a rocky first 10 years, but it worked out very well, because it turned us into a massive volunteer organization. We do a lot of work, as I will tell you in a second.

We now call ourselves the National Academies. This name is about two years old, because under the same charter, two other honorary organizations were subsequently incorporated, the National Academy of Engineering, and the Institute of Medicine. Together, these three organizations have more than 5,000 members.

In World War I, an operating arm of these organizations, which was named the National Research Council, was set up, because it was realized that scientists, engineers don't have all the answers, and we need lawyers, teachers, others to put on these advisory panels that we established. And of course, World War I made that very obvious.

Today, we are a very active organization, more than one report every working day; 85 percent of these are requested by the US government. The critical issue for everyone who uses our advice is that they know they are getting independent advice. What the no compensation whatsoever clause turns out to mean is that the government will pay for the cost of the study, that is, it will pay for the airfare for the volunteers who serve on the panels, their hotels and their food while they are here, as well as for the staff to support them.

Despite the fact that the government pays for it, they understand that they have no control over the result. So, after the first meeting or so when they put their input into the panel's deliberations in an open session, the committee writes their own report, and the full text is released to the press and to the public as soon as the report is delivered to the government. We don't negotiate the answer, and that's what makes us valuable.

There are two kinds of reports, science for policy, which is most of what we do. I'll give one example of that. And policy for science, which is a very important function. And what this meeting is about, at least to some extent, is policy for science.

Science for policy, there was a dispute right after Pres. Bush came into office about the level of arsenic in drinking water that should be set by the Environmental Protection Agency. Gov. Whitman asked us to look at the science, and we did that, and discovered that arsenic was actually more dangerous than we had thought earlier, and therefore, she accepted the 10 part per million standard that Clinton had recommended just before he left office.

Policy for science, this is our huge report, a contribution by the academies after the September 11 event. This report called, "Making the Nation Safer: The Role of Science and Technology in Countering Terrorism," basically lays out a road map for what is now the Department of Homeland Security. This was very unusual, because we had more than 160 people involved in this one.

Well, this symposium involves policy for science, and some important aspects of this concerning scientific publication as far as I'm concerned are the validation aspect, the dissemination aspect, and the fact that specific obligations are created when the publishes, and I just want to go very quickly over those.

The validation function of publication of course is accomplished by peer review and editing to be sure that the science is valid. And we insure that the data and the methods are complete and clearly presented. This is what distinguishes scientific journals from the mass of stuff that is on the Internet.

I really very much appreciate the editing and the refereeing function, because I get all kinds of scientific ideas mailed to me personally as president of the academy, which I have no time or ability to evaluate. There are a lot things claimed to be science out there, and we need to discriminate between what is and what isn't good science, otherwise, we can't move forward.

Publication of course also has a dissemination function, and that's what this meeting is really -- that's what is really novel about this meeting, because we have a new way of disseminating, electronic publishing on the Internet. It greatly enhances the potential reach of the dissemination part of science. It allows us to reach nations and peoples who would otherwise not be reached. And by allowing powerful search engines to rapidly find desired specific information, can we in principle, make much better use of the data and the information and the knowledge that is out there.

This latter function I assume will be talked about here. We could do a lot better. There is a great opportunity for what is called data mining, so, if we could really find what we really want. There are a lot of journals that are not yet up in available form. I get letters from our friends in India, for example, pointing out that their journals are not really abstracted by our services. Science is an international activity, and we need to do better about making the knowledge that is developed everywhere, available.

Well, we all know about this. I'm a biological scientist, by the way. This, I think is a wonderful effort by our government to take what was formerly the Medline services, that when I was in my laboratory at the University of California, San Francisco, I used to ration by students' use of Medline searches, because it cost me $100 every time they were -- they weren't too careful about how they used it, and it would generally cost me $100 for every session that one of them was involved in.

So, I, along with everybody else in the world, was overjoyed when this came to be a free service, basically, a contribution of the US government, using taxpayer monies, to make the biomedical literature really accessible. This, of course, is run by the National Library of Medicine.

Our own journal is the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). I see Nick Cozzarelli, our editor-in-chief this year. We have tried to set an example by making it as available as we can without going broke. And we make it immediately free to 130 developing nations on the Internet now. And we make it free to everyone after a six month delay.

Here are some of the countries. I couldn't get them all on the slide, but you get the idea. As these countries become more effectively connected to the Internet, this is going to be enormously valuable for them, and it will change their opportunity of their universities and their scientists to participate in this great international scientific effort.

We also publish, of course, our reports. And we want to do the same with them. This is a different kind of scientific literature. This is consensus studies of what the science that other people have done means in terms of arsenic in drinking water, climate change, thousands of other issues. This is about 10 years worth of our reports. All 2,800 books are up online, and we have now made the PDFs that we have for these, immediately free to 130 developing nations as well.

What about the obligation? So, I have talked about the validation. I have talked a little bit about dissemination. And I want to talk about the obligation part. We had a workshop here about a year ago or so. It was sponsored by the Board of Life Sciences, and its title was, "Sharing Publication-related Data and Materials: Responsibilities of Authorship in the Life Sciences."

Tom Cech, the head of the Howard Hughes Foundation, was the chair of this group. Tom, of course, is a Nobel prize winning scientist, and a very outstanding biomedical scientist.

And basically, they made these points. The publication of scientific information is intended to move science forward. More specifically, the act of publishing is quid pro quo in which authors receive credit and acknowledgement in exchange for disclosure of their scientific findings, providing these findings in a forum on which other scientists can build with further research. That's how science works.

An author, therefore, has the obligation to reasonable data and materials -- this is life sciences, remember -- to enable others to verify and extend published findings. Therefore, publication creates obligations in science that need to be enforced. These need to be enforced through grant agencies that fund, and through the journals that publish the work.

And without this kind of sharing, the progress of science will be greatly slowed. So, these are all issues that come to my mind. I should point out although I have been a bureaucrat for 10 years, full-time job here in this building, before that I was a scientist for 30 years, so I'm telling you things that I understand from my own life as a biological scientist.

So, in ending, I just want to invite you to do two things. If you have not been here before, there is a wonderful statute of Einstein right out on Constitution Avenue. It's the last place where the school trips end, where they take the pictures of the kids sitting on his lap, and sometime during your stay here, please do that.

We also have a wonderful new building downtown. We actually inaugurated it about a week ago. It's the new Keck Center of the National Academies at 500 Fifth Street near the National Gallery of Art. And I urge you to come visit us there as well.

Thank you.

[Applause.]

It's now my pleasure to introduce Ted Shortliffe, who deserves a great deal of the credit for organizing this symposium. He is a member of COSEPUP, which is the Committee on Science, Engineering, and Public Policy. It's the highest order group we have doing mostly policy for science. He took on this obligation as part of his membership in that group.

Ted.

Agenda Item: Symposium Overview - Edward Shortliffe, Professor and Chair, Department of Medical Informatics, Deputy Vice President for Information Technology Health Sciences Division, Columbia University, and Symposium Chair

DR. SHORTLIFFE: Thank you, Bruce, and welcome to everyone here. We have a great turn out, and actually many more people planning to arrive. So, I wanted to reassure you that those barriers are going down at the break, so that we will use the entire auditorium. We were a little surprised to seem them there when we arrived this morning, and we will be able to spread out a little bit more later in the day.

I'm pleased to have an opportunity to welcome you on behalf of COSEPUP, the Committee on Science and Engineering Public Policy of the National Academies, and its chair, Dr. Maxine Singer. This was a topic that was brought to COSEPUP as a potential issue worth of symposium and further study about a year and a half ago, and I'll tell you a little bit about that in a moment.

My own interest in this topic, I quickly became interested in participating as COSEPUP decided to take this on, because I come to this as both a medical scientist, and a computer scientist, and therefore have been aware of the fascinating interplay between scientific activities, scientific research, dissemination of information and technology actually not just since the Web, but going back some 20 or 30 years, certainly to the introduction of Medline.

In my early days in the National Library of Medicine on committees here, I became aware of a major foreign publisher that was upset that Medline was being provided at prices that seemed so low, that the commercial sector could not effectively compete, and therefore it was actually a foreign who was lodging serious complaints about something that most of us had come to accept as a wonderful resource, just as Bruce was mentioning a moment ago.

It's hard to be in science, and not be aware of the changes that have occurred in the last 25 years or so. As an administration in the dean's office at Stanford University in the 1990s, I became aware of what was happening in the library budgeting process.

I oversaw the library there, and the acquisitions budget going through the roof, and the cutting of more and more journals, and the challenges of wanting to move into a digital collections. And simplistic questions about gee, if we can go digital, do we really need a physical structure anymore? Or can't we just use it just for old stuff? And actually, these are big issues that we need to address and handle.

And it is part of the reason that every institution is feeling challenged by being caught in a period of transition where we deal with the paper of the past and the present, and the recognition of a very different electronic world that is already upon us, but will be evolving even more in the future.

We see the publishers struggling with these same issues, trying to determine proper pricing mechanisms. Trying to decide whether to tie electronic access to paper subscriptions, the kinds of topics that we will be discussing over the next couple of days.

Now, today, I edit a journal, which is a traditional journal in the sense that it actually comes out on paper. On the other hand, we decided, given the topic and the kind of people that write for it, that it was quite reasonable for an international journal of this sort to be done totally electronically until the moment when the paper is produced in the final form.

And that experiment has been going very well. We do essentially all submission, all reviews, all interaction with authors and reviewers electronically. And everyone has sort of embraced that without any difficulty whatsoever. But we encounter significant debate among the editors, the editorial board, the authors, and the publisher about just what the access to this now electronic publication ought to be for our readers, not just in the Third World, but in the US. Who really owns the content that we are putting out, or who should own it? And what costs should be.

So, when the council of the National Academy of Sciences asked us in COSEPUP to consider this topic a few years ago, I think they were driven by very much these same kind of soul searching questions going on within the academies; major publication activities such as those that Dr. Alberts just mentioned, obvious PNAS, and then all the National Academies Press publications already caught up in the transition to an electronic world, and with significant issues about how much the role of paper would be in the future, and what the pricing and access issues ought to be.

Now, there have been many symposia, and in fact even here at the National Academies, several reports on the general subject of electronic publishing and rights, and copyright. And so as we began to plan for this event, we wanted not to be duplicative, and instead to try to identify those areas in which there seemed to have been less attention, or where the answers were less clear.

We recognized that some of the answers we would all like to have need to be supported by data that are not yet readily available. And that will become clear, I think, as we discuss this topics today and tomorrow. But I was fortunate in having a tremendous steering committee that brought the expertise I lacked in knowing a tremendous amount about this topic.

All of them are involved in some way in the program, and you will get to meet them and hear from and every one of them: Dan Atkins, from the University of Michigan; Floyd Bloom from Scripps Research Institute; Jane Ginsburg from the Law School at Columbia; Clifford Lynch from the Coalition for Networked Information; Jeff MacKie-Mason from the University of Michigan; Ann Okerson from the library at Yale University; and Mary Waltham, currently a publishing consultant.

All these individuals live lives closely connected to this topic, and worked hard, with many, many phone calls among ourselves to try to put together what we hope you will find to be both stimulating and novel over the next two days.

I'm not going to give long introductions to individuals, because all the bios are provided to you in the registration packets, and you can find out about people's backgrounds and interests and activities that way.

Among other things, I hope you find the next day or two to be provocative. I know that several of the speakers are planning to be provocative, and that is fine. We hope for that. You will note that we have also done something that is a little unusual for meetings here in that there is much more time for discussion than is sometimes allowed at meetings of this sort.

It's one of the reasons that this is almost a two day meeting. We felt that the topics were sufficiently controversial and difficult, and there were so many opinions and questions that might be asked that we really wanted to make this as accessible the audience to ask questions, and make some comments, as just to have selected individuals who are on the program, do the talking.

So, you will see as you look at the program, significant time after every one of the five panels for discussion. And we have microphones here, and we encourage you all to feel free to participate at that time, although we will, so that everybody gets a chance, ask you not to take too much time at the microphone when you come up and ask a question or make a comment.

How we organized it, we tried to be a little different in the way we did this. Today, there are three panels dedicated to the sort of here and now. Tomorrow is much more looking to the future. The first panel is just looking at costs. What does it really cost to do publication in an electronic world? And it's interesting how little public data there are on that subject.

In the second panel, looking at the various business models for balancing cost, income, and access concerned. And in the third panel this afternoon, legal issues in the production and dissemination and use of materials in an electronic world.

And then tomorrow, two topics, both in the morning. First, what will publishing be in the future? And second, what will it mean to be a publication in the future? And we have some indications of this as our knowledge of this topic evolves. And then we have some sort of predictions or anticipations about where it is all headed.

After lunch tomorrow is an attempt to try to bring this all together. We have some excellent observations, who are going to be here listening to every word, and trying to help us summarize and talk about some of the key lessons. Our goal is to produce, when this is all done, not only the symposium itself, but a report based upon the symposium that will be available both electronically and in print form, and also to give some advice to the NAS council and National Academies, as they requested when they asked this to be put together and scheduled.

Now, because there was substantial interest in this event around the country from people who could not actually physically be here, the National Academies have decided to make this available over the Internet. You may have seen some messages to the effect that this is being Webcast today. So, there are a couple of implications of that.

[Administrative remarks.]

And with that introduction to the event, and my welcome to you all, I would like to start things off by introducing our keynote speaker, and that is Dr. James Duderstadt, president emeritus and university professor of science and engineering at the University of Michigan. Jim has been there about 35 years at the University of Michigan, although he, as a member of the faculty, has taken time off not only to be president, but also provost and dean.

His training was in electrical engineering from Yale, with a BS, and from CalTech with a PhD in engineering science and physics. He has worked in nuclear energy, both fusion and thermonuclear fusion, and has received the National Metal of Technology and the Yale Lawrence Award. He has been chair of the National Science Board. He is a director at Unisys and CMS Energy, and he too, is a member of COSEPUP at this time.

He's been very involved with the National Academies over the years. He has done studies for the National Academies, "Scholarship in the Digital Age," with the NRC, "The Impact of IT on the Research University," with the NRC, and he recently wrote a book with one of our steering committee members, Dan Atkins, as well as with Doug Van Houweling on higher education in the digital age.

So, he has thought a lot about the issues that are before us today, and we are delighted that Jim has agreed to kick things off.

Thank you, Jim.

Agenda Item: Keynote Address - James Duderstadt, President Emeritus and University Professor of Science and Engineering, Millennium Project, University of Michigan

DR. DUDERSTADT: I suggested to Ted that perhaps we regard this front section as first class, and those folks that arrive too late, we'll back in coach, where most of us fly, I suspect, these days.

Well, it's a remarkable turn out on a crisp winter day in Washington. I suppose it's a good sign of just how important the issue of electronic publishing is.

The goal of this conference is to bring together experts from an array of constituencies, producers and users, to look at some of the technical changes that have occurred in electronic publishing, and how that influences decisions to publish or not; to identify the needs of the science, technical, and medical publishing enterprise itself as users of journals; to understand the responses of both the commercial and not-for-profit scientific, technical, and medical (STM) publishers; and to examine a very broad spectrum of proposals and activities underway that are attempting to respond to the needs of the community with these new technologies.

I think a major focus of today and tomorrow will be on looking at business models, and trying to establish the degree to which they address many of the challenges and concerns. But I would also suggest that during the discussions it important to keep in mind the ongoing developments in the scientific enterprise itself, stimulating in part, and being stimulated by this kind of a scholar communication.

How is electronic publishing affecting the practice of scientific research, the communication of research results to scholars and others, perhaps including the public, the curation of data and evaluation of research and archiving of results?

The challenge is to identify the issues, the problems that the STM community really needs to control and resolve if it is to exploit the remarkable opportunities, and to cope with the challenges presented by this very rapidly evolving technology.

Now, I must confess that when Ted approached me about kicking off this discussion, I was a bit perplexed, because as a one time, and now once again scientist, and a has been university administrator, my basic approach to these issues has been one of avoidance -- trying to avoid the hassles of publishing as a scholar, and trying to avoid as an administrator, the costs of acquisition, and the maintenance of STM journals.

After some further, and I should acknowledge desperate thought, I was able to identify several potential hyperlinks between my own experience and the subjects you will discuss today and tomorrow. I continue to be a voracious consumer and occasional producer of electronic media. I know write books rather than papers, but I also dabble in multimedia, 3-D simulations, and virtual reality, and so forth.

At least count, I not only have a half a dozen computers in my office, but over a terabit of data sitting on my desktop in various firewall drives. And I don't have a clue on what is on most of those drives, but it just passed the terabit.

During my last years as president of the university I built a major library of the future at Michigan we called the Media Unit. And that houses part of the servers for the JSTOR project.

And I went through a rather unique experience several years ago. As you know, Michigan is very much in the news these days with a major court case, two court cases actually, in front of the Supreme Court. And I am the “et al.” in those cases.

As a result of the deposition experience and getting ready for that, they decided to put the entire electronic inventory of everything I had scribbled down, received, drafted during my roles in university leadership, online on the Web through our library, over 3,000 documents. And once again, I don't have the nerve to go to that Web site and see what's on it, but I understand some of it is boring, and some of it is rather disturbing.

Most important, over the last two or three years, Bruce and his colleagues in the National Academy, convinced me to co-chair with Bill Wulf, president of the National Academy of Engineering, an interesting research project trying to understand better the impact of digital technology on the future of the research university. And that will relate to some of the comments I'll make later today.

The current situation can perhaps be described as a chaos of concerns, the continuation of some disturbing trends that have evolved over the last couple of decades that access to STM information is increasingly expensive, and in some cases restricted. And yet, the amount of information generated at research institutes continues to grow.

Journal subscription prices continue to escalate, and yet university library budgets fail to keep pace, particularly in these days with the collapse of the equity market, and the collapse of the state budgets. Last week, I had a chat with Bill Gosling, who is head of the University of Michigan libraries, to get his sense as someone on the front lines, of what has been happening. He has noted that the price inflation in electronic publication resources has continued to run well ahead of the CPI. He estimates it running at 10-15 percent increases a year.

But even more dramatic has been the increase in the pricing for reference tools, increasing as much as 600 percent over the print cost of bound volumes. The complexity of dealing with various financial models, the traditional acquisition of the physical form of the journals, but then licensing schemes to have access, and provide access to broader communities to broader forms.

The nature of searching these days that requires full text searches against a large number of titles leads to what librarians call super sizing, where you have to now subscribe to the full stable of titles offered by certain publishers in order to do this kind of search.

It's clear that these new technologies have created very fundamental changes in the production, the management, the dissemination, and the use of all kinds of information. And if I were to categorize very simply the two camps of concerns, on the part of the publishers the critical question is how many copies of work will sold or licensed if networks make possible planet-wide access? And the nightmare of course is that answer is only one. One document can be replicated time and time again, to not only serve, but perhaps collapse the entire marketplace.

On the other side, the nightmare to consumers is that in our efforts to preserve the marketplace, we'll put in place an array of technical and legal protections that reduce access to what should be a public good, society's intellectual and cultural heritage.

There are a lot of reactions and counterreactions at the level of the universities. The first reaction is a budgetary one. They simply cancel any subscriptions. In some cases this is mandated by simply the necessity of limited resources. In some cases it's an effort to kind of use a 2 by 4 to get the attention of the publishing industry, although what cancellation generally does is simply drive up the costs even further.

Since libraries are at a disadvantage in trying to negotiate one by one, they are increasingly forming an array of consortia to negotiate subscription licenses and packages, SPARC, the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition, within the CIC, which is the provosts' name for the coalition involving the big ten universities, plus the University of Chicago. There is an effort made to coordinate the libraries.

In fact, during the 1990s, the Big Ten Athletic Conference, which actually is the name of the presidents that sit over those institutions, actually took time out from debating football revenue sharing, and actually tried to merge those libraries into one gigantic library with 70 million volumes, with common acquisition and so forth. Some steps have been taken toward that, but that's an example.

In other instances you have seen essentially rebellion at the grassroots. Editorial boards that have protested against the commercial publisher journal prices, and have essentially resigned and moved to scientific societies, less expensive publishers.

The complexity and shifting from a first sale approach characteristic of paper, to licensing has caused a good deal of experimentation.

There are a lot of other variants. One that kind of reminds me of one of the components of Ann Arbor's heritage is what I called the university microfilms approach, an edition of one. That is, to begin to make it acceptable that there may only be one physical copy of a document that say a young faculty member may use in tenure considerations, but with the ability to reproduce that from an online copy, at the user's expense.

One of the more interesting approaches you will discuss I suspect over today and tomorrow are what I would call open source strategies. Universities are historically about open inquiry and communication. And the success of the open software movement through Linux, the Apache Web server and so forth have given rise to a number of initiatives, the Open Knowledge Initiative, the MIT OpenCourseWare Project, and others that aim at developing new financial models for the open distribution of scholarly materials, perhaps building charges for dissemination into research grants that generate the information in the first place.

I might note that this is not only consistent with the traditions and values of academia, but also reinforces the definition of the university as a public good, an issue that university leaders are increasingly worrying about these days, when the rest of society tends to look at us more as a market commodity.

In summary then, advances in digital technology are producing radical shifts in our ability to reproduce, distribute, control, and publish information. And yet, as this becomes more a part of scientific activity, it tends to run head long into the existing, practices, policies, laws that government traditional publishing.

The issues are complex in part, because the stakeholders are so many, so varied, with different agendas. People who fund research want to see that the information is advanced and made available to the public. They regard it as a public good in essence.

Authors, editors, and reviewers of course don't charge for their labor. They are motivated to contribute to the public good, but of course they also have other rewards, not the least of which is tenure.

Publishers, as intermediaries, while they don't pay for content, they do add significant value, and provide the work in published form. Libraries, similarly, are intermediaries. They provide access to STM content. They pay for content, but they usually don't charge for providing access to it. And of course, the users may either pay for content in some cases, or obtain resources free through libraries.

The dilemma I think was in my mind, best stated a number of years ago by an individual some of you may know, John Perry Barlow, who with Mitch Kapor founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He portrays himself as a gentleman rancher and former songwriter for the Grateful Dead.

Barlow's enigma is stated as follows. "If our property can be infinitely reproduced, and instantaneously redistributed all over the planet without cost, without our knowledge, and without its even leaving our possession, how can we protect it? How are we going to get paid for the work we do with our minds? And if we can't get paid, what will assure the continued creation and the distribution of such work?" That was an article that he published in Wired magazine in the mid-1990s.

And it was followed on by another provocative article by Michael Crichton in he suggested that this technology is completely undermining all media, which he referred to as mediasaurus, like the dinosaurs. This was in 1995. He said, "Soon we will have AI based agents roaming the databases, downloading stuff I'm interested in, and assembling for me a front page." It sounds like Google News, doesn't it?

So, how do we approach the issue? Well, your conference is going to break it down into five different panels, and then a summary panel. But what I like to do is make some particular observations in three areas; the changing nature of the practice of research in science and technology and medicine; just a brief comment about a couple of policy and legal issues; and then finally a comment about the extraordinary exponential evolution of this technology.

But first, I must step back, as all people that address this issue do, and make a general comment. I think we realize that the age of the 21st century is different than the industrial age of the late 19th and 20th centuries. We have an economy that is shifting away from material and labor-intensive products, to knowledge intensive products that increasingly depends on the creation and the application of new knowledge.

In a sense that means that intellectual property is becoming the most important asset of all as we approach the future. Again, returning to Barlow, "Notions of property, value, ownership, and the nature of wealth itself are changing more fundamentally than in any time since the Summarians first poked cuneiform into wet clay and called it stored grain. Humanity now seems bent on creating a world economy form based on goods that take no material form. In doing so, we may be eliminating any predictable connection between creators, and a fair reward for the utility of pleasures others may find in their works."

"Since it is now possible to convey ideas from one mind to another without ever making them physical, we are now claiming to own the ideas themselves, and not merely the expression. And since it is likewise now possible to create useful tools that never take physical form, we have taken to patenting abstractions, sequences of virtual events, mathematical formula, the most unreal state imaginable."

Well, it's clear that this creates a quite different world, both for those who generate knowledge, and for those who distribute it and use it. Now, back to the three perspectives.

First, the changing nature of science and technology research. One of your colleagues who will chair the fourth session, Dan Atkins, has just finished chairing a major National Science Foundation report, "Revolutionizing Science and Engineering Through Cyber Infrastructure." That is, trying to understand better, the changing nature of science itself as this technology becomes more and more pervasive.

As this report, which is now known as the Atkins report -- so, there is a certain fame associated with that -- is becoming more and more widely read, it points to the process of knowledge creation itself, experimentation, analysis, theory development, forming conclusions that is increasingly occurring entirely in the digital world.

And what that has done is shifted from kind of the sequential process of research, publication, validation, dissemination to more of a parallel flow model that is interactive, in which the process of publication and distribution actually becomes almost the process of research itself.

The key point of the report is that distributed network computing technology is providing a new kind of infrastructure for federating people, information, computational tools and services, and specialized facilities into virtual organizations, so-called colaboratories, grid communities as the Europeans call it, eScience, a cyber infrastructure.

The vision put forth by this report is to use this infrastructure to build more ubiquitous, comprehensive digital environments that become interactive and functionally complete for research communities in terms of the people, the data, information tools and instruments, and that operate at unprecedented levels of computational storage and data transfer capacity.

Part of the aim of this is to trigger the necessary public and private investments to create this cyber infrastructure, but nevertheless many elements of it are already in place, and it will significantly change the nature of scholarly activity. An example that we are all discussing today and tomorrow is scholarly publication.

A common quote many of you have seen before is that of Vannevar Bush a century ago, who wrote, "Our methods of transmitting and reviewing the results of research are generations old, and by now are totally inadequate for their purpose." And yet, much remains the same as it did in Bush's time, except the volume of literature has increased vastly, as have prices.

In a sense, the reality today is that electronic publishing is becoming the dominant mechanism for publishing and reading scholarly materials. It opens vast possibilities of course, but on the other hand, it challenges existing practices and principles, including the way in which we handle intellectual property.

It will likely then add a new paradigm for scholarly communications capable of providing open online access to the work of scholars without payment, online repositories of high quality, certified materials, along with a stable economic model to sustain these resources, a challenge of today and tomorrow.

This will pose a particular challenge to libraries, shifting them from a focus on collecting and archiving knowledge resources, to rather assisting scholars to navigate. Today, the campus library has become somewhat less central to researchers' lives. In one sense you can ask your colleague when the last time they visited a library was. And the reason for that is the library has evolved from a place into a utility. It too is becoming a part of the Net.

Legal and policy issues, the second topic. Well, I have to confess that I have the last six years of dealing with what looked like an army of lawyers to get ready to deal with this Supreme Court case, spending at last count between $15-20 million on their services, I'm not in much of a mood to talk about legal matters, even if I knew much about it.

But nevertheless, it is clear that the digital infrastructure that we are talking about imperils a great many of our ongoing practices and policies and laws that have served so well, intellectual activity in this country and globally over the last two centuries, perhaps forcing the rethinking of many fundamental premises and practices associated with intellectual property.

Indeed, there is a concern that many of these will be challenged to the bedrock. I think from the publishers point of view, a copyright is really the legal foundation of the business itself. The exclusive right to publish material for a length of time creates the basic legal mechanism that will allows publishing costs to be recovered. It essentially shifts the financing of the publication from that of a patronage activity, to the marketplace.

And again, to quote Barlow, "We are sailing into the future on a sinking ship of our current intellectual property policies. This vessel, the accumulated cannon of copyright and patent law, was developed to convey forms and methods of expression entirely different from the vaporous cargo it is now being asked to carry. It is leaking as much from within as from without."

The final topic, the evolution of digital technology. As I mentioned, a couple of years ago the National Academies decided to launch a project, forming a study group chosen from industry, higher education, and people that were involved in policy to understand better what the implications of digital technology were for the research university, but I suggest even more broadly for the research enterprise.

The concern was that while the opportunities and challenges of this technology were important, there was a sense that many of the most significant issues were neither well recognized, nor understood, particularly in the wake of the collapse of the dot-coms, which really has put many institutions and their leadership to sleep.

The first phase of the project was aimed at addressing three sets of issues: to identify those technologies likely to evolve in the near-term, that means a decade or less; second, to examine the possible implications of these for the research university; and third, to determine what role, if any there was for the federal government and other stakeholders in the development of policy, programs, and investments in the development to protect the role and the contribution of research universities.

A report was put out on this first effort. You notice how revolution tends to appear in all of these reports these days. It kind of tells you something. And what I'll do is I will just briefly mention some of the conclusions from that, because I think they apply very much to this particular discussion.

Although most people on the study group had some familiarity with the technology, I must say we were both surprised and to some degree, made uncomfortable by the future that the chief technologists from companies like AT&T, Bell Labs, IBM, Xerox Parc, and so forth put in front of us.

The fundamental conclusion was that this extraordinary evolutionary pace of digital technology shows no sign of slowing, and in fact, components of it may be on a superexponential evolutionary trend; so-called riding the exponential. It could be that processing power begins to move away from Moore's law, but wireless capability, storage, printing and so forth may be evolving even more rapidly.

Many examples of this, the enormous effort from the national laboratories has once again driven a very substantial investment in supercomputing. And technologies to achieve petaflop computers are now running several years ahead of where we thought, with the first of those computers likely to appear within the next three years.

I mentioned that I have about a terabit of data storage on my desk. That in itself is a surprise, but apparently that is also increasing at a doubling time of a year or less.

Bandwidth, maybe we can ask people that have their laptops with their Y5 to sit behind the screen and look at this on the Net. But even that technology is moving very fast. My current computer has 55 megabit per second wireless capability, and our IBM colleagues tell us that's on the way to a gigabit per second.

Displays -- resolution is already much better than paper in the laboratory, soon to appear in the commercial sector. I've seen the new flexible displays and so forth, that have been announced over the last week.

Similarly, in software and system technology, whether it's algorithm improvements, new approaches to developing technology, such as the open software effort, new technologies for the Internet, such as the semantic Web, where we build in to Web-based documents, the capacity for machine readability. All of that suggests this technology is not slowing down, that the kind of killer app surprises we have had in the past are likely to appear again.

The second conclusion, well stated by Mary Anne Fox, who is head of the Government, University, Industry Research Roundtable, and president of the North Carolina State University is that the impact of the technology on the university will be profound, rapid, unpredictable, and discontinuous. In the words of Clay Christianson, it's a disruptive technology. It will affect the activities of the university, our teaching, our research, our outreach, how we are organized, how we define our faculty, and students, how we finance ourselves, how we manage and govern ourselves.

In that kind of an unpredictable future, the belief was that procrastination and inaction are the most dangerous courses of all during a time of rampant technological change.

Point three, and an interesting one, it was our belief that universities should begin the development of strategies for facing this kind of technology-driven change with a firm understanding of those key values, missions, and roles that need to be protected and preserved during a time of transformation. Traditions such as academic freedom, a rational spirit of academic inquiry, and liberal learning. Here again, you can see the degree to which these fundamental and early conclusions propagate into the broader research enterprise itself.

As Ted mentioned, this conference is really organized into a here and now series of panel discussions this morning on costs, on business models, on legal issues, and then moving tomorrow into the future. What does this new kind of cyber infrastructure-driven research enterprise suggest about the nature of publishing in the future? What is a publication? And then finally, pulling this all together.

Two other issues that I might suggest will come on the table from time to time that relate to this, but are not specifically woven into the program are other kinds of constraints. That posed by commercialization, as we see the soaring commercial value of much of the intellectual property that rolls out of our research laboratories, and increasingly out of our classrooms.

The tendency of institutions and individuals to exploit that raise very significant challenges to traditions such as openness and academic freedom. Don Kennedy pointed out in an editorial in Science magazine a couple of years ago that this may be the great enclosure, the restriction of the openness of research that we have to deal with.

The second one Bruce and his colleagues have been dealing with, within the academy goes under the title of homeland security and openness. Achieving an appropriate balance between scientific openness and the restrictions on public information necessary for national security, once again, an issue of great importance that weave in and out of some of these discussions.

In conclusion then, I think the turn out today, and particularly the presentation from various constituencies -- authors, publishers, libraries, readers, and users -- demonstrate a commitment and compelling importance of developing workable, sustainable models for scholarly communication in the digital age.

As you begin your discussions, I would like to leave you with a quote. You have heard it before, but I think it's perhaps appropriate to put it out on the table again as we begin the discussion.

"If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess, as long as he keeps it to himself. But the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it."

"That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and the improvement of his condition seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature when she made them like fire, expansible over all space without lessening their density at any point, and like the air in which we breath, move and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions, then, cannot in nature, be a subject of property." Thomas Jefferson, not a bad principle to start a symposium by.

Thank you very much.

[Applause.]

DR. SHORTLIFFE: With that great introduction, we are ready now to start with our first panel. And I will let the individual panelists be introduced by Floyd Bloom, but Floyd from Scripps and former editor of Science is here to get things underway.

Thank you, Floyd.

Agenda Item: Panel 1: Costs of Publication, Moderator: Floyd Bloom, The Scripps Research Institute, Opening Remarks

DR. BLOOM: While our panelists are taking their seats, I want to welcome you all again to this symposium, and thank my panelists for agreeing to take on the challenge of responding to the remarks you will hear shortly from Michael Keller in a very time-limited session.

As you heard, we are audiocasting this from the Web, so we are going to try to make every effort to be as precise as we can by following the time. We hope those who are listening to us on the Web will feel free to send in their questions. We are going to have a break in about 50 minutes, and following that break we will have an hour and a quarter for discussion. So, your questions from the Web site are most welcome.

As a scientist, as a reviewer, as an author, as an editor I don't think I ever considered costs in what I was doing. It was only when I became president of the society that sponsored a journal that cost reared its evil head. Cost concerns control quality and timeliness. So, it's natural that we start this symposium of the consideration of the costs of scientific and medical publishing.

We have to consider the costs of production, the costs of paper and ink and sending it out, and the costs of acquiring the content that will be produced, and that make our journal competitive with other journals. How much quality can we afford to pay for, and how much competition can we afford to let go by the wayside?

We have to be concerned with the explicit, rigorous peer review that makes a scientific journal carry its merit. We have to be concerned about the copy and quality of what we put out. Nothing irritates and editor so much as finding typos when the journal is received in the mail.

How about the era of online publication? How about the linking to the databases that give your publication equal access and immediacy, and carry it back into the perspective of the past? Why do these things cost so much, and which of these costs can we factor out and control them if we knew how to?

We have a variety of perspectives that you will hear from this morning: a librarian, publishers for both online and journals of large and small societies, and a commercial publisher as well. We hope from their perspectives that we will gain at least a broader understanding of what the costs are, how they vary across fields and forms of publication, and what if anything, as a proactive participation in this never ending challenge, we can do to control them.

We're going to start with an overview, to be delivered by Michael Keller, Stanford University librarian, and electronic publisher of the HighWire Press. He will followed by Kent Anderson, the publisher for the New England Journal of Medicine, then Robert Bovenschulte, publisher for the American Chemical Society, and Bernard Rous, electronic publisher for the Association of Computing Machinery. Lastly, we will hear from Gordon Tibbitts, president of Blackwell Publishing USA.

Before I introduce Michael, I just have to say that Prof. Duderstadt's recollection of Wired magazine from 1995 gives me a recollection of 1995 as well. Exactly eight years ago today I was in the third month of learning how to be editor-in-chief of Science magazine. I was called into the office of the executive officer, who had the treasurer by his desk. I thought they were going to increase my budget.

They said, young man, let me remind you -- I was young eight years ago -- that Science is a not-for-profit publication. That also means we are not-for-loss. And the costs of paper is going up by $700,000 in the next six months. And the cost of mailing the magazine is going up 20 percent. So, where in this budget that you are responsible for do you want to make the cuts?

And I swallowed deeply, and I said, there has got to be some way that I can control these issues, and not have them control me. And four months later I met Michael Keller, and my world changed in ways that I never even knew how to predict.

Michael.

[Applause.]

Agenda Item: Overview Presentation - Michael Keller, CEO, HighWire Press

MR. KELLER: I want to start off by saying hello, mom. It's so rare.

Secondly, I deeply respect Dan Atkins, with whom I have worked for about 10 years I guess, more or less off and on, and Jim Duderstadt, the president emeritus of University of Michigan, but this is not a Michigan tie. This is a tie from my college, Hamilton College, a somewhat older and much smaller place in upstate New York.

And finally, I need to issue a disclaimer. Although the program says that I'm the CEO of HighWire Press, I'm not the CEO of HighWire Press. I may be the chairman of the board of HighWire Press. I may be the responsible officer at Stanford University of HighWire Press, but John Sack, my colleague in the back is really the CEO and the director of HighWire Press.

Let me start this presentation with a few slides composed by Michael Clark of the publishing division of the American Academy of Pediatrics, presented in a session of the HighWire publishers conference a few weeks ago. These slides give a good overview of the institutional marketplace for STM journals. And while these notions are not directly on the costs of publication of electronic journals, they do set the stage, I think, for many issues that will arise today.

I do not propose to read these slides. I'm going to stand here silently and let them appear.

Some of the information in Michael's slides is derived from a Morgan Stanley report promoting the value of Science as an investment opportunity in a report named, "Scientific Publishing: Knowledge is Power," issued September 30, 2002. Morgan Stanley of course, has Reed Elsevier as a client.

We do not live in a tidy world. In order to present some trends in the arena of costs of publications from the time just before we all got seriously into Internet publishing until the present time, I conducted a survey of a very small sample of not-for-profit STM publishers. I will present the digested results of that survey. But I must emphasize that these can only be regarded as illustrative of the changes in costs, not as definitive.

I will present as well, some categories of expense that must drive the pricing, but do not appear on the expense budgets of not-for-profit publishers. And I will mention as well, some new categories of expense that may, and I emphasize the tentativeness of the verb, may appear on publishers' budgets in the future, but do not now.

Based on the literature on the subject, including especially the reports and writings of Donald King, Carol Tenopir, and their associates, as well as in what I have learned over the recent years from the publishers receiving services from HighWire Press, I offer the following formulation of the main elements of expense budgets for some STM journal publications.

First, the process costs for the content of the journals come in several subcategories. By the content of journals, I mean primarily articles, reports of the results and methods of scholarly investigation. Other sorts of content such as news report, policy, and editorial statements, and other organizational content are included in the figures below -- yet to be seen -- but are incidental to the main content type, scientific articles, for the vast majority of journals emanating from STM research communities.

Thus, the cost budgets for Science and Nature, for instance, would have more elements than specified. And costs for secondary and tertiary publications include different elements than these. I do not cover these sorts in STM publishing.

Here are the categories on the content side. The costs for manuscript submission, tracking, and refereeing, operations performed manually before the World Wide Web, and now assisted by specialized software applications using Web communications among authors, editors, and referees.

Second, the costs of editing and proofing contents. Operations increasingly innervated with the origination of the text from the minds of the authors, to their word processors on one side, and with the composition of pages on the other.

Third, the cost of composition of pages, increasingly more efficiently, less common, or at least related environments for creation, editing, and page make-up are employed.

Fourth, the costs of processing special graphics, costs most publishers find increasing, because the means for collecting or constructing graphic images are more easily employed now than a decade ago, and the authoring tools are easier for authors to use. In addition, the fact of Internet publishing and its capacity to deliver more images, more color, more moving or operating graphics has made this expense grow for STM publishers in the last decade.

The second category of expense is a familiar one, but is also one of two targets for complete removal from the publishers' costs. It is of course that of the costs of paper, printing, and binding. The year-old survey undertaken by my organization, and involving over 10,000 respondents produced some telling results.

The first survey, reported in October 2001, showed that 75 percent of respondents preferred online retrieval, most of whom printed out articles locally they wanted to read. The second survey, conducted in February 2002, confirmed that finding. I'm going to present information about that survey a little bit later with a hyperlink to its site.

This suggests the possible that as researchers educated and beginning their careers in the 1990s replace retiring older members of the STM research community, publishers might finally switch over to entirely Internet-based editions, and distribute no paper at all. This transformation would thus move the costs of printing and paper to the consumer desiring articles in that form, and remove binding from the equation altogether.

The third category of expense is that of distributing the physical volume, the costs of mailing. Obviously, this expense could disappear if we got to Internet only distribution.

The fourth category of expense is that of the Internet publishing services. These are new costs, and include lots of activities performed mainly by machines, though in some situations staff perform quality control pre- and post-publication to check and fix errors introduced through the publishing chain.

Errors corrected the process result from incorrect use of SGML or XML codes, new non-standard characters, references that will not link, because the citation information is inaccurate, and various formatting issues that work on paper pages, but wreck havoc when a DDT is attempting to convert a coded file through SGML to an HTML utilization.

And the elements of these costs vary tremendously among publishers and Internet publishing services. At the high end: parsing supplied text into a rigorously controlled version of SGML or XML; making hyperlinks to data and meta data algorithmically; presenting multiple resolutions of images; offering numerous elaborate search and retrieval possibilities; supporting reader feedback and e-mail to authors; supporting alerting and prospective sighting functions; delivering content for indexing to secondary publishers and distributors, as well as to Internet indexing services; and supporting individualized access control mechanisms would be included.

At the low end, that characterized by PDF only e-publishing, just access control, simple search, common access control mechanisms, and delivering content for indexing would be included.

The range of costs in this element is quite wide, though as you will see, the size of this category in the expense budget is relatively small.

The fifth category is that of publishing support, everything from catering of lunches, to finance offices, including facilities and marketing. All of these fall into this one.

Another category is the cost of reserves. Some organizations have money set aside for disasters, or to address opportunities. Some of these reserves for capital projects, or to hedge against key suppliers failing. A great many not-for-profit organizations do not label reserves as such, but have investments or bank accounts whose earnings support various programs, but whose principal could be used in a reserve function as needed.

There are a couple of categories I include here for debate, though I am sure that they will rise in later sessions on pricing and business models. For the sake of argument, I present them here. The first debatable category is the cost of non-journal support for other organizational programs. By this I mean demands on journal expense budgets eventually driving pricing, and yielding revenue in excess of expenses, including overhead and reserves with expense items for application to conference calls, fellowships, and other non-publishing activities.

A similar cost item in the for-profit sector of STM publishing would be I suppose, demands of owners and equity holders for profits. Note, however, the tremendous difference in scope and intentions of these two last items. One the hand, income in excess of expense in the not-for-profit sector, and profit in the for-profit sector.

Another related cost mainly in the for-profit sector and particularly prominent in these past years as mergers and acquisitions among the largest companies has occurred is precisely the cost of mergers and acquisitions. Another controversial category of costs is that of declining circulation. The cost of fewer subscriptions covering all the expenses, and in the case of a for-profit, the cost of profits, mergers, and acquisitions.

Here are the results of the statistically insignificant sample of six not-for-profit publishers' costs concatenated so the results can be compared. The data were presented in a wide variety of categories, so element of interpretation is at work in these results. And I finally settled on presenting the data as a pair of ranges, one for the data from the early 1990s, and the other for recent data.

A cost not appearing on the expense budget is that of the intermediaries, the subscription agents who get from 5-10 percent of the prices for their work. Maybe this figures into the pricing structure, but one way or another for the institutional subscribers, it is a cost.

How might these data be interpreted? First, if you had read my notes and seen what I have gotten, you would see that the publishers have much tighter control now over their budgets than they did 10 years ago. The definitions of categories are better.

Second, it is clear that editorial costs have not changed much, but that printing, paper, and binding costs are down, at least on a unit basis. Also, the cost of Internet editions have entered the budgets at the level of 4.5-9.1 percent of the costs. Respondents to my inquiry indicate that their publishing budgets have doubled since the early 1990s, but that the individual subscriptions are almost half in many cases, apparently cannibalized by institution Internet subscriptions.

Certainly, cost increases reported by these not-for-profit publishers are on the order of 6 percent annually. With a reduction in individual subscriptions, the number of copies of issues printed, bound, and mailed has gone down, but increases in costs have kept budget numbers from falling.

Manuscript submission tracking and refereeing support applications have reduced mailing costs, and made it possible for more manuscripts to be processed by existing staff. Increases in the size of the journal in page equivalents, increases in graphics and colors in some instances, and the adoption of advanced Internet features like supplemental information and so forth, have increased the costs of Internet publishing services about 50 percent higher per year than other costs.

Obviously, there is some sort of dynamic balancing act going on with regard to publishers' costs in this Internet era, some increasing, and some decreasing. What is most intriguing, however, is the possibility of removing from 25-32 percent of the costs of publishing by switching to electronic journals delivered over the network, and eliminating printing, binding, and mailing paper copy to any subscribers at all.

One might further observe this as a transfer of costs from the publishers to the readers who desire to read articles on paper. On the other hand, one might observe that this is not a new transfer of costs to readers, because many already photocopy like crazy, and presumably cover that time and cost somehow. Eliminating paper editions would also offer some promise of reducing prices to the institutions who are so clearly providing the publishers with the economic basis for publishing at all these data.

What change condition or conditions would permit the removal of the printing, binding, and mailing costs? Simply put, the successful operation of true digital archives, protected repositories of bits and bytes for the contexts of journals would make that difference. A true digital archive or repository in my view, and that of most librarians is one that is not merely an aggregation of content accessible to qualified readers or users, but one that preserves and protects the content, features, and functions of the original Internet edition of the deposited journals over many years, decades, and even centuries.

True digital archives will have their standards and operational performances publicly known and monitored by publishers, researchers, and librarians alike. Their operations and content then will be audited regularly. We do not yet know how costly automatic data migration will be over time, and therefore, we do not know the costs for these operations. It is not enough for a publisher, a library, or a third party, say an aggregater or other information business, to declare themselves to be an archive. They must prove it constantly.

What might be the annual cost of true digital archives? They range from the incredibly cheap, as in the case of LOCKSS. These are network caches, a design that involves publishers and libraries in willing partnerships enabling dozens, maybe hundreds of local caches on cheap magnetic memory, and using very ordinary CPUs. Our estimate is that each of these LOCKSS caches could operator for only tens of thousands of dollars per year.

Another model is that of the large, managed digital repository for multiple data formats and genres of publication. Our estimate is that Stanford can operate and maintain a very large one, perhaps a petabit or two of data for between $1-1.5 million per year, half for staff, and half for technology.

A petabit for those of us who are not members of the National Academies here, is 10 to the 15th power. HighWire's database now is in excess of 2.5 terabits, or 10 to the 12th power, to give an example of how very large a petabit is.

Which institutions will undertake such large managed digital repositories? Almost certainly a few national libraries and university libraries will. But publishers or their Internet service providers could develop and run them as well.

Apparently, the European Union's laws require deposit of digital editions in one or more national libraries soon. And the Library of Congress, along with other US federal libraries promises to develop both its own digital repository, as well as to stimulate and support a distributed network of them. If publishers undertake digital repositories, their costs will enter in the expense budget, and of course drive prices higher.

Another cost about to hit home to many publishers is that of converting back sets of journals to digital form, providing some level of metadata for each article, or perhaps providing word indexing to the contents of each article, posting and providing access to the back sets. The costs of this are just now being encountered.

We have done a study on back sets of HighWire journals. Our estimate is that about 20 million pages could be converted, and that the costs of scanning and converting pages to PDS, keying headers, loading data to the HighWire servers, keying references, and linking references could approach $50 million, or about $150,000 per title.

If all this retrospective conversion of back sets occurred in one year, HighWire would have to spend about $250,000 in capital costs, and about $300,000 in initial staff costs, declining to annual staff expenditure of perhaps $250,000 or $275,000 thereafter.

On average, for the 120 publishers paying for services from HighWire that would mean about an additional $2,500 in new costs each year. In other words, the increase in annual costs to publishers for hosting and providing access to the converted back sets would be a fraction of 1 percent of their current expenses each year.

While the costs back set conversion are high, our experience suggests that the pay off could be 5-10 times more use of articles in the back sets than is presently experienced. Articles running to the HighWire servers are read at the following rates: within the first three months of issue, about 95 percent of all articles get hits. That's presumed that hits means that somebody is actually reading something.

In the next three months, that is when the articles are 4-6 months old, about half of that, slightly less than 50 percent of all articles get hits. And when articles are 10 months or more old, on average only 7-10 percent of all articles get hits. But that rate of hits seems to persist no matter how old the online articles are.

We believe on the basis of citation analyses that only 10 percent of articles in print back sets older than the online set of digital versions of themselves get cited. That is cited, not necessarily read. That they should do so is entirely consistent with the commonly held belief since 2001 by publishers associated with HighWire that the version of record of their journals is the online version, making the sell for the entire run of their titles as logical next step, and many are taking it.

I digressed into benefits there, forgive me. At any rate, unless other sources of funds are forthcoming, the costs of back set conversion will become a temporary cost in the expense budgets.

There are chickens and eggs in expense budgets too that complicate understanding them over time. For instance, it is our observation at HighWire Press that publishers in the early adopter class, those who first define and desire advanced features, play the cost of developing those innovations. Certainly at HighWire, those early adopters reap the benefits of innovation in attracting authors and readers. Eventually, many of the innovative features are generally adopted, and usually at lower cost of adoption than paid by the innovators to innovate.

In order to maintain a reputation as innovative, one has to continue adopting new features. On the other hand, some innovation leads to lower costs. HighWire recently announced reductions in prices thanks to some processing innovations recently published.

We had a feeling that the Internet editions have either reduced calls upon librarians for help in finding relevant. But I can tell you that no Stanford science librarians are volunteering to reduce their staff size as a result.

Certainly, the Stanford e-journal study shows that readers of online journals value the search engines and strategies, the navigation devices, hyperlink, and availability of various resolutions of images. Alerting services are particularly well thought of too. Certainly, these sorts of online functions lead users to be more self-sufficient in their search for information.

On the other hand, some at HighWire feel that the customer support has been transferred in some measure to publishers. Certainly, that is true in activating subscriptions, but my limited and statistically irrelevant survey did not show any significant increases in customer support provided by publishers over the past decade.

Let me close with a few observations and questions. A close study of the costs and benefits of electronic journal publishing from the birth of the World Wide Web would be a good thing to do. It would document in a neutral way, the profound transformation of an important aspect of the national research effort.

That there is likely to be as much change in the next 10 years as in the past does not obviate the need for the study. In the light of our current economic situation, such a study may help us develop new strategies or evolve current ones for accommodating needs of scientists and scholars to report their findings, and for assuring the long-term survival of the history of science, medicine, and technology. The National Research Council is ideally suited to conduct such a study.

University budgets are under considerable strain, and will be so for at least several more years. Will be deals for access to all journals from a single publisher survive? Will we see new deals for multiple titles, cut just right to fit true institutional needs, real institutional needs?

Finally, a comment on why there will be costs in any version of the present STM publishing system, regardless of the mode of presentation, whether published in print, electronic, or via the yet as to be invented selective extrasensory perception method. It's coming.

Why shouldn't there be a highly diffuse distribution scheme based on authors simply posting their articles on their own sites, or on an archive like the Los Alamos National Lab (LANL), arxiv archive, and let Google or more specialized search engines bring relevant articles to readers on demand? Who needs all this expensive apparatus anyway?

The answer lies partly in the strong need for peer review of content, expressed variously by most communities of science, and partly in the functions provided by good publishers that are valued and demanded by the scientific community itself. The e-journal survey mentioned earlier shows that the vast majority of respondents to that extensive survey, want, and have come to expect a wide array of features making their regular surveys for articles relevant to their work, easy to find, and to use. By implication, the readership focuses their attention in the constantly churning galaxy of new and old articles on a few journals with editorial policies and content that are known and trusted.

Providing relevant, reliable, and consistent levels of content in journals costs money. Highly distributed, diffuse STM publishing with sketchy peer review, dependent upon new search engines to replace the well articulated scheme of thematic journals and citations in a multidimensional web of related articles is a descent into information chaos.

Perhaps in the next decade the segment of STM publishing most at risk are the secondary publishers, the abstracting and indexing ones, and the tertiary publishers, those producing the review and prospective articles long after the leading edge researchers have made use of the most useful articles.

None of the alternative publishing experiments underway or about to get underway, including LANL, arxiv, operate independently of a larger STM journal publishing establishment, and none operate without costs. Taking LANL, arxiv in particular, while it is certainly an archive of articles to which many in physics, mathematics, and computer science go to first and constantly, it has had negligible effect, if any at all in the direction of reducing the number of peer reviewed articles published in these fields.

It may have improved the articles by exposing them in pre-print form to lots of readers, some of whom may have commented back to the author with helpful suggestions. Physics Letters and Physical Review have continued to grow, continued to publish peer reviewed articles, and those articles continue to be cited.

It must be observed that some communities use and read pre-prints reluctantly. While there are 200 articles in the British Medical Journal's Clinical Netprints, few have received online and public peer review from readers, and fewer, if any, have been cited in that form.

One note of interest. Several experiments in journals, depending nearly entirely on fees paid by authors. The new journal Physics, for example, has published between 25 and 50 articles in each of its five years of existence. It has not yet had sufficient citations to be indexed by the Science Citation Index.

The gyration of business plans of BioMed Central are instructive too. Now, after trying author fees alone, they are selling memberships to institutions so that authors from member institutions do not have to pay for publications. But the fee for memberships are very high.

The Public Library of Science will enter the list with its first articles in the fall of 2003. It too will depend upon authors' fees for support of its operations. And is starting with an admirable $9 million war chest from the Moore Foundation. It will charge $160 for print copies of its volumes.

The point of mentioning these efforts, all of which are involved, I believe, in the open archive initiative standards, is that none, not one has done away with the costs of publishing. Someone always pays. And none of these journals with new business models have become self-sufficient.

For the costs of peer reviewed publishing in science, technology, and medicine to disappear, requirement for peer review, the demand for thoughtfully gathered, edited, illustrated, and distributed articles must disappear too.

How the experiments in business models might provide competitive pressure on traditional business models and pricing is a topic for discussion here, and examination over time. Experiments should be tried, but for me, the solution to the serious crisis lies in the not-for-profit societies whose purposes and fundamental economic model are very closely allied with the purposes and not-for-profit economic models of our research universities and labs.

Thank you very much.

[Applause.]

DR. BLOOM: Thanks very much, Michael.

We are going to continue for the next half hour by hearing from four different societies, different sized society home journal publications, and one commercial publisher. We are going to begin that discussion with Kent Anderson from the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM).

Agenda Item: Comments by Panel Participants - Kent Anderson, Publishing Director, NEJM

MR. ANDERSON: Thank you, Floyd. And thanks to Mike Keller for a good introductory presentation.

My name is Kent Anderson. I'm from the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). I wanted to begin by giving you a quick overview of the New England Journal of Medicine. We live at the interface of scientific research and clinical practice. We have been published continuously for 191 years. We were published in paper first in the 19th century. We published online first in the 20th century. And we continue in both media in the 21st century.

We mainly serve clinicians, physicians who take care of patients. And we are a key translator and interpreter of new science to general and specialist physicians around the world.

When I was preparing these comments, I thought about how unique our situation is. We are a large circulation publication that relies on individual subscriptions, and we are owned by a small state not-for-profit medical society. So, I wanted to limit my comments to three areas. One, how the definition of publication is changing, and how that is modifying how we conduct our business of getting the journal out week to week. And finally, some of the cautionary notes about conducting a study of this due to the diversity of publications represented in the room, and among the users here.

Publication used to refer to the act of preparing and issuing the document for public distribution. It could also refer to the act of bringing a document to the public's attention. These definitions served us well for a good long time, for more than 400 years, or even longer.

Now, publication means much more. Now, it means a document that Web-enriched, with links, search capabilities, and potentially other services nested in it. A publication may soon be expected to be maintained in perpetuity by the publisher. A publication now generates usage data.

A year ago if I had been asked to give this talk, I would have probably given a talk that would be much different, because costs in this area are emerging at such an unpredictable and rapid way, that if I give this talk a year from now, it will probably be much different.

So, it's May 19, and I will give you what I know today. For publications serving physicians, costs for print have reminded steady and risen here and there, and we try to control those. However, what we found behaviorally is that physicians are not willing to give up print. They are too pressed for time, and it's too convenient. I think there was recently a publication by King and Tenopir supporting this finding as well.

We also support significant costs for Web publishing, data analysis and reporting. We develop new services at a rapid clip. And we support the costs for new publishing modalities, our online only publication, early release articles, free articles to low income countries, free research articles after six months, and selective free articles online.

Our mission is to work at the interface of biomedical research and clinical practice. As medical and scientific findings become more complex and sophisticated, we are investing in editors, writers, and illustrators who can analyze and interpret these findings for a clinical audience so our readers understand precisely how medicine is evolving.

Our education mission is more complex now. We have invested heavily in new continuing medical education initiatives, new ways of illustrating and presenting articles, and new ways of helping users find what they are looking for. It is more important than ever in some ways, more difficult than ever, to know who our readers are.

We can no longer look at print distribution to point us to our readers. The Web amplifies and concurrently obscures readership. So, investments in market research, Web data analysis and warehousing, and attending medical meetings with physicians have increased significantly.

Customer service demands have escalated, and building systems to handle these changes, staffing to handle the new demands of service by e-mail, which typically leads to additional phone calls and mail service are adding to the cost of running a publication.

I think fundamentally, we are now on a software upgrade path with our services online, our content presentation, our content parsing, and search engines. For the New England Journal of Medicine we are currently at version 4.0. I think we will probably be going to version 4.1 sometime next year.

Online peer review tools in parallel with paper systems have recently added a new layer of cost, with no apparent end to the investment, because that is another software upgrade path we are on. We also have to find ways to modify our skill sets of our highly skilled editors and workers, to make sure that they can handle all these new inputs, and maintain the quality of the journal.

With all of these programs, ways of accessing the journal, making our information available, we have to tell people about this. Marketing these new programs an services is another expense that we typically don't recoup, but we execute despite that. We need to get the word out that there are new ways to access our information, and we do that as part of our mission.

E-mail systems are part of this distribution modality now, and we have to support those, build those, maintain the databases, and consistently send out e-mails to people without strain off the line.

The pressures to be fast are growing, yet we have to maintain high quality. We publish information about health, and if we make mistakes, they can be serious. These emerging demands have lead to increased investments in systems and people to insure that we can be responsive when the need is warranted.

Recently, we published a set of articles on SARS, Sudden Acute Respiratory Syndrome, and we published those in two weeks or less of receipt, completely peer reviewed, edited, and illustrated papers. These were translated into Chinese within two days of their initial publication, and distributed in China in the thousands in print, where we hope they made a major difference.

As demands for faster publication mount, we will need to find ways to accomplish it without sacrificing quality, and this is already leading to significant investments in people and systems.

We have I think -- often in these discussions the people behind all this become obscured. We are fortunate. We have, I think like a lot of publications here, very talented editorial production, IT, and publishing people, and we want to keep it that way. And those people have to be paid.

Now for some closing comments on the viability of a study of this. I would just like to throw out a few questions. I think that if this is studied well, there has to be an acknowledgement of the diversity of the publishing landscape, even in the scientific, technical, and medical publishing area. If only a few publishers participate, the selection bias could drive us to the wrong answers.

We have to look at which cohorts we are trying to analyze. We have to clearly state what the null hypothesis is. What is the question we are asking? And what is a reasonable control group? Consumer Price Index and others are used, but those are very, very pooled numbers based on all sorts of different industries. What's a control group for science, which is growing at a rapid clip?

I think that a study of this nature could be valuable, but it needs to be well designed, rigorously conducted, and carefully interpreted.

Thank you.

[Applause.]

DR. BLOOM: We'll next hear from Robert Bovenschulte, who is the publishing director for the American Chemical Society (ACS), another small society-owned series of publications.

Agenda Item: Comments by Panel Participants - Robert Bovenschulte, Director, Publications Division, ACS

MR. BOVENSCHULTE: Good morning, and thank you, Floyd.

I hope it doesn't come as too big a shock to Mike Keller that I actually agree with a great many of the things he said, probably in fact the vast majority of them. Electronic publishing has not only revolutionized this industry, it has also tremendously changed the fundamental economics of what I will characterize as the business.

Even though I represent a not-for-profit publisher, in fact many of these issues do overlap both commercial and not-for-profit publishers. And having just completed a two year term as chairman of International STM Association, I feel obliged at least in some of my comments, to represent a broader view than just the not-for-profits.

Well, what is driving this change? Our costs are going up very rapidly, and much more than would have happened if we had stayed with print alone. There are really two principle factors. They are obvious I think to all of your. One is of course the cost of new technology. And the other is the volume of publishing that is being done.

The good news is that with all of this expansion of cost, and commensurate expansion in price, although some would say an incommensurate expansion in price, we are delivering a tremendously more valuable product to our users. There are enormous functionalities that I think all of you are familiar with that are being conferred upon our scientists.

The access to information is swift, it is convenient, and it is improving productivity. We have in fact tangible anecdotes coming back from many of our end users about what they have been able to do as a result of having all of our content available to them on the Web.

It is implicit I think in some of the remarks that have already been made, and I want to make it very explicit that technology is not just about Web publishing. Technology now imbues all facets of publishing from author creation and submission, all the way through peer review, to production and editing, and to output, and to usage.

That's a very important dimension, because often when we say technology, we think it means Web, and it includes Web, but it goes really far beyond it. Why that is important is that the costs of the technology are not just the Web. They really apply to all the other systems that we have to create. And not only do we have to create them, we have to find some way in the fullness of time to integrate these systems into one. That is no small task.

I want to give you a few examples of the kinds of costs that may not be obvious if one is simply clicking on a Web journal. For the 31 journals published by the ACS, we have 186 editorial offices worldwide. All of those offices have to be supported. That's mainly in terms of the technology. And we have to develop new technologies that support the functioning of those offices, and make them more productive.

That mean visits to these sites by technical people to provide support. It can't all be done on the phone. And this is a very, very costly enterprise. Furthermore, we have about 100 staff located out in Columbus, Ohio as part of Chem Abstracts, that is to say housed with Chem Abstracts, part of the publication division, responsible for editing and production. This is a very major expense, as you can imagine.

Now, turning to studies, in fact, a year ago the ACS conducted a study through the Seybold(?) Consulting Group, and it was really quite interesting. We were engaged in a very thorough assessment of the future of electronic publishing broadly speaking. And in particular, we were trying to put our hands around the cost drivers.

So, Seybold did this study, and we offered it to I think 16 or 18 publishers. Almost all of them took advantage of participating in the study. And the deal was that they would see the same study that we saw, even though we were paying for the work to be done, and their cost was coming up with the data.

Some interesting numbers. In terms of revenues generated by a publishing endeavor, both the median and the average cost among these 16 publishers was 5.5 percent going into just this IT function. Furthermore, large publishers allocated less than 2 percent, and ACS, to give you a benchmark, spends about 9 percent.

It is obvious then that larger publishers with a lot more revenue can spend a much smaller percentage, and yet they are far outspending the medium-sized and the smaller publishers in the total amount that they can invest in the IT operation.

To give you another idea of how this trend is going -- now, this was done a year ago -- and the predictions of the 16 publishers in aggregate were an average of a 21 percent increase in their IT spending year over year.

So, that's enough about technology. Let's look briefly then at the growth in the number of articles being published. The ACS has gone from 15,000 articles in 1993, to 23,000 in 2002. That's a 53 percent increase over that 9 year period.

At the moment, we are actually -- I say at the moment. I mean over the last two years or so, we are now experiencing double digit increases in submissions. And I think this largely spurred by the fact that online submission makes submitting an article even easier. And we are receiving a much larger fraction of our submissions from outside the United States.

During this same nine year period, total costs increased at 64 percent, again, that's versus the 53 percent increase in articles published. But the cost per article published -- this is a very important point -- has increased only 7.4 percent. I'll give you the exact numbers. In 1993, for every article we published, it cost -- these are all costs that we can attribute to the journal operation -- $1,712. In 2002, the cost was $1,838.

So, I think that there has been quite a significant gain in publishing productivity, because I think that we would probably see similar numbers if we looked at other publishers, not just within the ACS. I think this is attributable in large measure to technology. Technology does cost a lot more, but it is seeming to produce efficiencies.

I want to say something about the digital repository. Mike Keller referred to this as the back sets. The ACS is one of the first publishers to create a full digital archive, PDF form only, of all of its journals. This was a very large upfront cost. I think in the future we will see that preserving that could be both the responsibility of the library community and the publisher.

At some point, Mike Keller’s notion of trying to move toward one system I think has a lot of merit. That is not going to be easy to achieve, however, and in the interim I think the publishers, even the commercial publishers, but certainly the not-for-profit publishers feel a very strong obligation to preserve that digital heritage.

And by the way, this isn't just about preservation. Talk about costs, there are enhancements, there are costs associated with the migration to new technologies. It is as simple as just thinking that the one time we spend a couple of million dollars, and we won't have to spend much more in the future on it. No, it goes on and on.

Ending print is certainly a worthwhile goal. And we have a position at the ACS for five or six years now that we are doing nothing to retard the rate at which the community wants to dispense with print. And we would be very happy to reduce our price increases, possibly even hold them flat, or even a small reduction during a period when the print is being eliminated as a way of returning those costs to the community.

However, all of the information that we have -- this specific now to the chemistry community, broadly defined -- is that the end users, and particularly the scientists who write for our journals are not ready to give up print. And for good reason, I think most librarians are not ready today to give up print, because of the preservation issue.

So, if that happens, if print does go away, there might be a savings of, as Mike Keller suggested, 15, 20, 25 percent of costs. What concerns me is that in very short order, with the rising volume of publication, the costs of handling those many more articles will in fact wipe out whatever transitory gains we have from saving on print.

That concludes my remarks.

[Applause.]

DR. BLOOM: Next we will get the views of Bernie Rous from the Association for Computing Machinery.

Agenda Item: Comments by Panel Participants - Bernard Rous, Deputy Director/Electronic Publisher, ACM

MR. ROUS: I've been involved with the development of electronic products and digital production processes for over 20 years at ACM, that's the Association for Computing Machinery. And I would venture to assert that the costs of electronic publishing are not really well understood at all. I believe that there are some very good reasons why this is the case. And it would make a study of costs both very difficult to carry out, and very important to attempt.

So, first, electronic publishing is not a single thing. This has been mentioned a couple of times. You can take author created PDF files and mount them on a Web server with a simple index, and that is electronic publishing of a sort.

Or you can manage a rigorous online peer review tracking system, convert multiple submission formats with single structure document standard, apply editing, digitally typeset and compose online page formats, and apply style specifications to generate Web displays with rich meta data, supporting sophisticated functions, build links to related works, to associated data sets integrated with multimedia presentations and applets that let the user interact and manipulate the data.

This too is electronic publishing. And it is miles apart, and many decimal points away from the first approach. In our own ACM digital library we have worked that are produced at both ends of this enormous cost spectrum called electronic publishing.

A second reason why electronic publishing costs remain fuzzy comes as a consequence of living in a bimodal publishing world. Even some direct expenses can arguably be charged to either print or electronic cost centers. Where you put them often depends on your conceptual model. If you look at online offerings as an incremental add on the print, then you charge more costs to the print. On the other hand, if you look at print as a secondary derivative of your core electronic publishing process, more costs are likely to be charged to the digital side.

And when it comes to the indirect costs of staff and overhead, the same applies, with perhaps even greater leeway due to the guesswork that is involved in these types of cost allocations.

Thirdly, the decisions to charge costs to print, or to electronic publication are part of a political process. There are times when you want to isolate and protect an existing and stable print business, so you attribute any and all new costs to the digital side. You may also want to minimize positive margins on the digital side to avoid debate over the pricing of electronic products.

At other times, the desire to show that the online baby has taken wings and is self-sustaining, and has a robust future can tilt all debatable charges to the print side. And this is not to say that the books are being cooked. It's just the way you look at the business that you are running.

Fourth, it is very difficult to compare print and electronic costs, because the products themselves are just not the same. The traditional average cost per printed copy produced is meaningless and very hard to compare to the costs of building, maintaining, operating, and evolving a digital resource as a single facility.

Fifth, accounting systems sometimes evolve more slowly than shifts in publishing process. New costs appropriate to online publications are sometimes dumped into pre-existing print line items.

Sixth, electronic publishing has not reached a steady state by any means. There is still lots of development going on, some of which lowers costs, and some of which raises them. So, these are some of the reasons why I say that the costs of electronic publishing remain somewhat obscure.

And in the remaining minute or two I would like to mention several components of electronic publishing costs that we did not fully anticipate when we went online. First of all, customer support costs have been phenomenally different than in print. Not only is there a larger volume and variety of customer complaints and requests for change, but the level of knowledge and the expertise required to answer them is much more expensive.

The cost of sales is higher. The product is different, and the market is shifting. We no longer sell title subscriptions. We license access to a digital resource. The high price tag for a global corporate license, or a large consortium means that more personal contact and hand holding is required to make the sale. And furthermore, such licenses are not simply sold. They are negotiated, and sometimes with governments. And this requires much more expensive sales personnel.

Third, digital services are built on top of good, clean meta data. Meta data costs are high. The richer the meta data, the higher the costs.

Fourth, subject classification is costly. The application of taxonomies is a powerful tool in organizing online knowledge. The costs for building what has been referred to as the semantic web are still largely unknown. There are a surprising number of opportunity costs. There are so many new features and new services, new ways of visualizing data and communicating knowledge. There is a lot more work that can be done than has been done so far.

And lastly, I would simply add that some upfront, one time guesstimates in electronic publishing turn out to be recurring costs, some of them with alarming frequency. At ACM we are in the middle of our fourth digital library interface release since 1997.

Thanks.

[Applause.]

DR. BLOOM: Our last panelist is Gordon Tibbitts, President of Blackwell Publishing USA.

Agenda Item: Comments by Panel Participants - Gordon Tibbitts, President, Blackwell Publishing USA

MR. TIBBITTS: I see that I have two very big challenges. One is that I'm the last panelist between you and a break, and that usually means that I better say just a very few things. And the second is that of all things that they asked me to speak about is cost, and I personally am not widely inspired by costs. In fact, I think it's what between us and good things like dissemination of ideas.

I decided to just ask a simple question. I'm kind of a little popularist here. Is there a cost tipping point in e-journals, i.e., the place where all the sudden the costs will dramatically drop, and everybody will run in, and there will be a brand new golden era?

And what I would like to do is just take you through very quickly, five slides, make a few points. I heard a wonderful thing earlier, and that's very good, because I prefer it, I heard that maybe say a few provocative things. I am a commercial publisher. I will try to represent commercial publishers, and perhaps I will be a little bit provocative. I must say that some of my colleagues on the panel have already been quite provocative.

Very quickly, this is just a look at two classes of commercial publishers. One kind of commercial publisher out there, and there are really are two blends. One kind is very heavily society-oriented publishers. It's more of a service agency. I'm highly familiar with that one. That's the one on your left.

And then there is the commercial publisher who owns most everything, sometimes people think most everything on the planet. And I think that the major difference between two is in the case of the one on the left, there are quite a few more royalties paid out -- profit shares, royalties, stipends, money flowing back to the societies who are the gatekeepers for the information, for that peer reviewed information, and the societies who publish the journals. And on the other side, that is taken mostly in profit.

Just another point, an issue of scale. You will notice that marketing and sales, there is about a four point difference between the two in sales, but when you talk billions of dollars on the right, that four points translates into massive marketing dollars.

What I did was I took a sharp pencil. My CFO was not happy, but I did it. And I went through and I took a look at what I call e-incremental costs, those things that I could separate out as being purely new costs that the business is incurring that are electronic. On the one hand, and from a marketing perspective, we contribute our data to SOROS and WHO and our data is in Eastern Bloc countries, and in the sub-Sahara for free. And you can look at that as a charity event, or really from a commercial publisher's standpoint. What it is, is a good marketing or PR activity.

Many of the societies though do have a fundamental bylaw in their society which is disseminate information, and sometimes that is for free. And there is a cost to that, and I quantified that, about 7 percent.

There is consortia selling, a brand new thing. You have to negotiate, as I heard with government. Yes, you do, and that costs quite a bit of money. We have a fairly large consortia selling for us. The reason for that is that you have to keep the ProQuests and EPSCOS, if you know who they are, in check. You can't let everybody else just run the sales force.

The other aspect is digital work flow. We have heard some from our panelists about that. In editorial function there are many new things -- alerting services, current awareness products, and lots of new products being built. What I would like to do is say that the biggest cost that is up there is content management.

It's a whole bunch of new people running around with new titles, and their job is to really get that information, organize it, and disseminate it. And this new dissemination method can be through Web sites, Palm Pilots, libraries, online systems. And it's a lot further than just the Web.

My main comment here is that guess what? I don't think this is new. One of my backgrounds, I worked for about seven years in the information industry delivering medical informatic type products. And guess what? I think this is very, very, very old news. This is an information business.

In an information business you have three primary costs, developing stuff, maintaining stuff, and operating stuff. And every one of our new incremental costs have those components. You don't build something once. You go through versions 1, 2, 3, 4, and 10. Microsoft knows that very well, they keep upgrading you. You've got an ongoing requirement to pay licenses, and ultimately you do need humans to actually operate these systems.

Very quickly, I like to look at this as the shared cost bubble. You've got a Venn diagram on the left that shows there is an intersection. There are some costs that are purely electronic. I just talked about them. And perhaps, since there is a lot of intersection, there will be a collapsing of the cost structure of the electronic journal. And you might come up with a small p, small cost in print, and a small e, a small in electronic.

More likely, we are right now with a large print cost, and a small electronic cost. Or as Bernie put it, you could play games, and you could actually go with a little P and a big E depending on what you are trying to accomplish on any particular day. Unfortunately, I think that we are most likely to have a big P and a big E most likely outcome.

I just went ahead and threw a lot of the trends out there that are driving costs up and down. There are all the new features we have talked about. Technology is out there to help us. I think Microsoft has come out with a fully embedded XML word processor. That should help a whole lot. Maybe all of us will stop being typesetters. I used to do that a long time ago. And let the typesetters do the e-content loading, and get the typesetting back where it belongs.

And then there are little technologies, like from small companies like Adobe, who have created an XML interface, a meta data interface, which might actually eliminate the need for all of us to go into these massive exercises of disintegrating what is already formatted, back into some format that we can create full text, and then re-integrating it back online. That's kind of silly, in my opinion.

And we have various other trends unfortunately driving costs, such as the loss of individual subscribers to consortia, and complexity, as we have heard.

Finally, a few points. I think the answer to the question is the cost tipping point is really no. I think there is a cost shifting point. And it is shifting really over to e-stuff. So, we are moving away from print towards E. Eventually, print costs will go down.

As a whole, the unit costs of course will go dramatically up. Finally, one big issue might cost a couple hundred thousand dollars to get out, disseminated to one person in print. But I think that likely, we will see a lessening in the big P over time. But E will take its place. There won't be any savings.

And then, just to leave you on a positive note, I do think that you can actually help quite a bit. One thing is quite trying to invent the moon landing. We don't need very complex systems. Some of the information just needs to get disseminated. And there are some technologies are simpler and more ubiquitous, and we probably should embrace them, and will keep costs in check.

Another thing that comes directly out of the information industry, and those people that had to develop a version, and then a version that killed the version, and then a version that killed the theoretic version that killed the theoretic version, those kinds of crazy cycles were controlled by people thinking about phases. And if we can phase those things that we embrace, we are likely to control costs as well. You can amortize back lists and back copy as you can imagine over time.

And finally, very most importantly, cross referencing and things like that, where many publishers get together and share standards, share archiving, and collaborate. That is certainly a very good way, and we embrace that fully.

Thank you very much.

[Applause.]

DR. BLOOM: Well, I must congratulate the panel. They did exactly what they were asked to do. They finished on time. We are no more than the six minutes late than we were when we started this session. We are going to take our 20 minute break now. Web listeners, please send in your questions, because the next hour will be devoted to comments and questions from you all.

[Brief recess.]

Agenda Item: Panel 1: Costs of Publication - Discussion of Issues

DR. BLOOM: We have received some questions that are being filtered, and we'll present those momentarily. But first, we're going to ask the panelists to follow-up on each other's comments, and ask each other questions for this first round of our discussion.

We heard Mike Keller say that it would be important for somebody like the NRC to do a neutral, objective cost analysis, and what those factors are. And then we heard Gordon say that he knows pretty much what those factors are, and they are just going to go from one side to the other as the situation goes on. So, librarians don't necessarily hope for a cheaper future, but a future in which service to the reader might be of greater quality.

Who would like to raise the first question over there? Bob Bovenschulte from the American Chemical Society.

MR. BOVENSCHULTE: I wanted to pick up on this issue. Doing studies of this sort is definitionally challenged. It is also methodologically challenged. That's not to say it can't be done.

But I want to ask Mike Keller, if the study were done perfectly, you had perfect information, what would you then do with the study?

MR. KELLER: I guess my response to that is which me are you addressing? Let me see if I can answer them serially. As a chief librarian responsible for managing a fairly substantial acquisitions budget, among other things, and responsible for serving a lot of different disciplines, I would hope that such a study would affect the responses of the library community as a whole to the problem set.

And the responses so far have been so fragmentary, so spread out over the chaos, the cosmology, that we haven't as an industry, as a block, influenced the play I think very effectively, or as effectively as we might.

As an Internet service provider, I think that kind of study would help us very much understand the comparative benefits or detriments of our various methods and operations, and cause us to become more critical in some ways than perhaps we are at the present time.

As a publisher of books for Stanford University Press, I hope, as I hope daily, constantly for some magic bullet that would help take control of those costs, so I could get into some kind of a self-sustaining posture.

And I think furthermore that it's very, very important for the research community first to understand as a community, have a common understanding as members of the community of what the deal is, and what the problem set is. I would expect them, therefore, to elevate the level of discourse on the problem set from jabs and jibs and press releases to something a whole lot more scientific than has been to date.

DR. BLOOM: You had mentioned in your summary that individual subscriptions across the board are diminishing.

MR. KELLER: Correct.

DR. BLOOM: What are your statistics? Can you attribute that solely to the institutional subscription to the online services?

MR. KELLER: No, I can't attribute it to anything. It's just an observation. My assumption , however, is that it arises from two pressures. One, are the rising subscription prices themselves to individuals or membership dues. And some business models that some publishers have involve extra charges for online access.

And secondly is the more easily available content through library servers that enables a scientist to go very easily among lots of different sources, including especially journals, without having to resort to lots of different user names and passwords. It's simply more convenient to do it that way.

Clearly, the publishers that we have worked with are very concerned about cannibalization, and have attempted in a huge number of ways, to figure out how to cope with it. And I don't think there is a single right answer. And maybe we haven't achieved the right answer.

DR. BLOOM: Follow-up questions?

MR. ROUS: I would like to ask a question of Mike Keller or anyone on the panel. It has to do with the costs that are associated purely with print. And in a number of comments, it seemed as if only we could get rid of print, there would be a huge savings in the publishing system. And I think that there is something true about that, but it's also true that although our own publications are rather inexpensive, there is a margin in the print publishing side of the business that we cannot afford to do without.

So, there is not only a demand from some customers, libraries for one reason, and end users for another to continue some level of print. But on our own side, the margins that we realize on the print side are actually necessary for us to continue the business at all.

MR. KELLER: Yes, and I think you have dealt with that very neatly in your discussion of the flexible ways in which one might account for costs and revenues. On the other hand, I would say to you that in observing the information seeking and using behaviors of my 15 year old and her cohort, I see almost a total ability to ignore print resources. They certainly read novels. They sometimes read popular magazines.

But when they are writing a paper, and mind you these are 15 year olds that are not sophisticated in any specific discipline, but when they are preparing a paper, most of them use the Internet entirely. And it is a regular feature of these papers that there should be media clips, sounds, various graphics dropped in all the while.

The point there is that it's only going to be 10 years before that cohort is at least entering graduate school or midway through graduate school. Another five years after that, and some of them are assistant professors heading for tenure. And frankly, the students of Stanford right now are driving the faculty in the same direction. And a great many of the faculty have figured it out as well.

I agree completely with Kent Anderson’s point that there are hosts of readers for a variety of reasons in some communities, for which online reading and searching is not presently an option that has been taken. But for those research communities, especially in the sciences that advance rapidly, and they are basic sciences -- physics, chemistry, math, biology, geology, the classics -- I think there is real promise for taking the print out of the equation altogether.

That doesn't suggest necessarily that there will be a total removal of those paper, printing, and binding costs. There should be, but you guys will figure out a way to save a little bit of that so your margin is bigger.

MR. ANDERSON: I think it's interesting traditionally to break out the costs of generating the first copy as a way to get your arms around what it would look like without paper and postage. You have maybe binding, dressing the press. Those are small costs, typically issue to issue.

And if you look at that, we typically look at editorial functions and other things oriented toward print. What I have never seen, and I'll probably go back and try to do now, is to incorporate all of the ML charges, the meta tagging, the publishing all of the complicated services around the first online copy, in addition to all of the copy costs per print, and see where our first copy costs actually come out. It's an interesting way of looking at things.

And then you get into the marginal costs, which for online, there is some perpetual nature to that. You don't just print and done, and you terminate. You support for 50 years, for 100 years. And how do you account for that?

MR. BOVENSCHULTE: I want to respond on this point. The ACS adopted a policy five years ago of trying to encourage its members to stop subscribing to individual print journals, and in fact to take Web, or to obtain it from their institution. And we create a significant pricing differential between print and Web, Web being obviously much cheaper.

To Bernie Rous’ point, I think there one out is to look at pricing models. And I'm not going to get into specifics, but one of the points of the revolution that we went through about three years ago was to create a new alternative model to print plus Web cost, which was Web cost only with print being a low cost option.

I think this was certainly pioneering, to give credit where it's due, by Academic Press. I think that that model has a lot of merit, because it starts you to think then about what are the true costs, and what margin do you need to sustain the business economically, and not get quite caught up with the fact that the reporting system tends to say that the print is profitable, and has a high margin that you then need to have in order to sustain the business.

MR. KELLER: Actually, that's a kind of funny model. The ASBMB, when it first came out with the JBC online selected two separate models, one which was the price for print subscription, and a separate lower price, rather lower for the E only version on the grounds that they didn't have to print on paper, and they were trying to encourage institutional subscribers in particular to migrate over to that E only version.

MR. BOVENSCHULTE: There are different economic realities.

DR. BLOOM: We have one question from a Web listener that I think. The British Medical Journal does everything that the New England Journal of Medicine does. It's available to the public without charge. Why can't the New England Journal of Medicine make theirs available?

MR. ANDERSON: Well, it's an interesting question. The BMJ has looked at the future, and seen it in a different way than we have. We have a lot of free access for people who truly can't afford access, people in 130 countries, and our research articles are free upon registration after six months.

I think the BMJ experiment is worth watching. I think it's interesting that they have a national medical society that has many means of supporting their publishing efforts, and they are able to conduct this experiment. I watch it with interest, like other people. But again, we choose different paths, and we have chosen a path where we rely on knowing that we are publishing information that people find valuable enough to pay for.

MR. KELLER: Kent Anderson, could you give us a little detail on that? What is the size of the Massachusetts Medical Society membership, and what is the size of the NEJM subscriber list or readership?

MR. ANDERSON: The Massachusetts Medical Society has 17,000 members in the state of Massachusetts. And the circulation of the journal in print is between 230,000-240,000. The readership estimate is hard to come by. We think it's somewhere between 500,000 and 1 million a week readers.

DR. BLOOM: Does the gentleman who comes to your HighWire Press meetings who represents the British Medical Journal on occasion had another part of that answer. Which is that the British Medical Association, the publisher of the BMJ is a required membership for anyone who wishes to practice medicine in the United Kingdom. And therefore, they have a huge subscriber base whether they sell it or not. So, it's free base comes with government subsidization.

MR. KELLER: And they also have other products for which they charge, other publications.

DR. BLOOM: In a moment we are going to open the microphones. If you ask a question, please state your name so that those on the Web can listen, and we can record it in our archives.

MR. KELLER: Floyd, I would like to ask Gordon Tibbetts a question. Gordon, your figures for the percentage of IT that was in your overview was I think 16 and change percent. That seems high to me. Can I offer you a bid for services?

MR. TIBBITTS: You're actually welcome. I think we actually do business with HighWire. I think that it's actually a very generous figure, because I think that there is a new reality within the company, and within most of our organizations if you choose to believe it or not. And that is people are being involved more and more in electronic development and dissemination.

Everything from electronic editorial office support, and people having to help people with coding. Editors are having to think about current awareness products now, and Palm Pilot products. And they are having to put tagging and coding further upstream in the dissemination development process.

So, guess what? IT needs to help develop those systems and processes. And in order to have those products out the other end, you have to spend the money. So, it's pretty generous, but a reality check. And in the IT industry of course, that would be a low amount of money spent.

And again, I think this is an information type company transition. We are going from being publishers of print, and I hear a lot of debate about that. And that is one output, but in an information kind of a business, we are going to have 20 or 30 different types of products. And publishers are having a hard time grappling with -- they do more than as Belushi put it, more than burgers and fries.

DR. BLOOM: Mike Keller, if the digital archive has these barriers, but if achieved would allow us to diminish the reliance on print, who would be the responsible organization to try to come to some agreement as to what that taxonomy and terminology should be for that kind of archiving?

MR. KELLER: Let me explain this a little bit, to put this in a frame that maybe I didn't in the talk. The support for the publishing industry comes not from individual subscribers. Those people receive their copies whether online or in print basically at the marginal cost of providing them.

The real support for the publishing industry comes from institutional subscriptions from libraries and from labs. It is the libraries and labs who are most unwilling at the moment, to give up paper, because we don't have a reliable way -- we know that no one has a reliable way to store bits and bytes over many, many years, and many different changes of operating systems, applications, data formats, and the like.

When we figure that out, and we are working at it, some of us pretty hard, then we are going to be challenging the publishing industry, which we support, to get rid of print, and get rid of paper, or at least not deliver those costs to us, because we will have figured that archival solution out.

Now, who is going to do it? There are efforts underway in Europe. The Library of Congress for the last couple of years, has run with congressional money, a big planning program. It comes under the term National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program, NDIIPP is the new acronym of the week in Washington.

They have gotten a second of funding, and some fairly substantial numbers, I think $25 million or $35 million from Congress, and they are headed for $100 million, provided that a $75 million match can be found elsewhere to invest in a capacity in the Library of Congress itself, but more importantly to distribute money for experiments, to support experiments in several levels, several different ways around the country.

We stay in touch with one another fairly well. Certainly, there are industry figures, and industry segments that are quite interested in this. So, you find content management systems, meta data management systems, you find the suppliers of magnetic memory anxious to step into the fray and help us out with gifts really of servers, and especially memory.

And eventually, we are going to piece that together. And I think that really in the next year, you will see some initial efforts to demonstrate the viability of these. We are going to have to simulate the passage of time and the passage of operating systems and so forth, but I think we can improve it.

Also, there is money that has been coming from the National Science Foundation to the Digital Library Initiative. And some of that money has gone to projects like LOCKSS to figure this out. I believe that within five years we will see some general acceptance of some methods.

Bob Bovenschulte and I had an offline conversation here. Bob mentioned that he thought that I said that there would be a single system. I don't believe there will be a single system. I think there will be an articulated system with lots of different approaches.

We do have agreements among us to have fail over sites, back up sites, mirror sites, you name it. And I believe that the national libraries in particular will be very important in this generational phase of the digital archives.

DR. BLOOM: I'm going to take questions from the audience now.

MR. MC HENRY: My name is Bruce McHenry. I'll leave the Google reference to the end, because I would like the listeners on the Web -- because I think this is an important question -- to get the answers. All of the panel members have got publications where peer review is the crucial distinction between simply having authors publish to the Web themselves.

I would like each panelist to describe their unique parts of their process, the best things about it, the worse things about it, and how they would like to see it improved. I will give my Google reference at the end of the answers.

DR. BLOOM: Kent Anderson, why don't you start?

MR. ANDERSON: Okay, I'll give it a shot. The peer process at the New England Journal of Medicine is rigorous. First, internal editors review paper submissions as they come in, judge them for interest, novelty, completeness. And if they move on from there, they go out to external peer reviews, two to six external peer reviews.

Those reviews come back, and then they are judged as to whether the paper will move forward from there. If it is does, it is brought before a panel of associate editors, deputy editors, and the editors for discussion, where the paper is explained, the questions are asked, and it is judged by that group, usually during a very rigorous discussion, one that people have reflected on challenges most of the rigorous discussions they see elsewhere in science, or even bests them.

And then it is decided whether it moves on or not. If it does move on, it goes through statistical review, it goes through technical review. The queries are brought to the author. If they can't answer those, it does not move forward. If they can, it does. The peer review process lasts anywhere from a few weeks to a few years, depending on the requirements. We put it back on the authors to either complete experiments or give additional data.

As far as weaknesses in it, or ways it could be improved, I think that one of the concerns we have right now is the time pressures in medicine are so great, that finding willing peer reviewers is more and more difficult. I think it could be improved by having people understand the value of this interaction in the scientific and medical publishing process, and having some sort of reflection of that in academia as a reward system, so that people continue to devote the time they need to the peer review process.

DR. BLOOM: As the number of submissions rises, the number of people available to give you dependable reviews of those articles has not increased. And so we are calling upon the same people time and time again, and they do it for the most part, for free. So, it's a very difficult service that we are demanding of the authors who want to be peers at some point.

MR. ANDERSON: Correct.

DR. BLOOM: Bob Bovenschulte, you can generalize on the ACS journal?

MR. BOVENSCHULTE: Yes. There is a lot of commonality with what Kent Anderson described, except that we are dealing now with 31 journals. The editor-in-chief of each journal has some number, in some cases a large number of associate editors. These are typically academicians scattered around the world, as I mentioned in my remarks, about 186 offices.

And they basically handle anywhere from 250-500 manuscripts a year. It's an incredible load. And they don't have the second level that Kent Anderson described, where the editors meet and decide. That's done associate by associate editor under the general guidance and policies of the editor-in-chief. So, it is quite a large machine.

The rejection rate is about 35 percent, something like that. It varies from journal to journal to journal. But as more and more articles are being submitted, and I think that's being stimulated by how easy it is to do that online, the result is that there is additional effort, additional costs. We have to add new associate editors and new offices in order to handle that load, even if the rejection rate goes up.

Finally, I want to comment on Kent Anderson’s idea, which is I think very true, and it is harder and harder to persuade people to serve as editors-in-chief, as associate editors, as reviewers, or as members of editorial advisory boards. They simply don't have the time. The best people are in enormous demand. The Web helps, and it does have the benefit of speeding everything up. But I think that there is the potential for a meltdown of the system in the next five years or so, particularly those journals that aren't seen as quite as essential to the community as others.

MR. ROUS: At ACM we publish several genres of technical material. And they each get different types of peer review. We have technical newsletters. And the kind of review for the technical material that goes in there is generally done by the editor-in-chief.

Conference proceedings in computing are extremely important. There is a very different review process that. There is usually a program committee, and each paper is accepted or rejected upon review by any number of people on that committee, depending on the conference. The rejection rates for certain high profile conference are even higher than in some of the equivalent journals in the same subject area. There is no author revision cycle in the peer review process for conference proceedings, and there is no editorial task.

We publish a genre that you might call magazines, where the material is actually solicited. There are very few submissions that come in over the transom. So, there is a different review process there, and the emphasis is not on originality of content. The material is being written for very wide audiences, so there are different editorial standards. There is a heavy rewriting of these articles in order to achieve that, and they are very expensive on the editorial side.

And then we do have about 25 journals that follow the typical journal review process, rigorous review, independent review, three independent reviewers, with author revision cycle and edit pass.

DR. BLOOM: Gordon Tibbetts, can you generalize across your shop?

MR. TIBBITTS: It would be very useful to generalize. We publish 648 journals. The primary component of all of them is they are all peer reviewed. We don't publish magazines at this point. The main characteristic I would say of the best of what we do is that we interrelate the societies. Because we have so many, we constantly introduce and co-mingle boards, and introduce those journals to one another, so that there is a good cross-section of board membership, not just nationally, but all around the world. And that is a value-added that Blackwell adds to the process.

We also spend quite a bit of time automating the electronic office. We pioneered a bit with partners, which I recommend all publishers do, technology partners, rather than build it themselves. We partner with several of the people that do electronic editorial office management systems, and that really facilitates a better, faster peer review process.

And probably the third, and fairly important characteristic is that we pay. We work with the societies, and we have been pressured quite heavily for many, many years now. And we have given into that pressure, as many societies will attest. And there is a need to pay editorial stipends. There is a need to pay these people that are working hard on the journals.

And yes, it does drive profits down, but it does retain them. And it allows them when they have five or six jobs already -- chairs of medical institutions, authors, practicing surgeons, things like that -- it allows some extra funding that they can sort of hire support and things like that.

DR. BLOOM: You were going to tell us.

MR. MC HENRY: The Web site is discussit.org, as in discuss information technology. And once you get past the agreement, the key page is knowledge operating system process description.

DR. BLOOM: Very good. Thank you so much.

DR. AL-UBAYDLI: I'm Mohamad Al-Ubaydli from the National Center for Biotechnology Information. One correction and one question.

I used to practice as an MD in the UK. And so just to pick up on the point about the British Medical Journal, you do not need to be a member of the British Medical Association to practice medicine. The BMA is a trade union for doctors in the UK. In fact, the case can be made that people only join the union to get the journal.

The question is you mentioned how electronic journals, ones where they split up the pure Web version from the pure paper version, the price of it is reduced. So, why are the electronic books available at a higher price? I ask as a Palm Pilot user. And books that I buy in paper for $20-25, I buy on hand-helds for upwards of $60. Is there a difference in the cost, or is there a marketing issue?

MR. TIBBITTS: You switched from journals to books, and they are similar, but different product lines. To take your question back to front, the unit cost in books and elasticity of that demand determines the pricing. There are more people sharing that freely, even though that shouldn't be allowed, they do.

And I think the reality of publishing books online is something I think the last three years have seen eight bankruptcies in large organizations that have tried to actually make money at it. So, it's a very dangerous area, and people do charge a little bit more for the online, because they realize they will get fewer units.

In terms of just almost a statement back, and you can respond to it though. In terms of whether or not the BMJ is subsidized by the government, there are costs. And I don't see the costs going away. And sort of an answer, but more of a question, the costs for that journal are still there. They are shifting, in my opinion, into having to develop online systems and coding systems and what not.

Do you suspect that that should be lower?

DR. AL-UBAYDLI: You mean the costs of doing things electronically?

MR. TIBBITTS: Yes, electronically.

DR. AL-UBAYDLI: From my understanding, there are costs, and they are considerable. I'm not sure what the British Medical Journal will do in the future about that. I know that they are doing this as an experiment which they can support at the moment, because of their position within the United Kingdom. But they are not in any way supported by the government. In fact, if you follow their dealings with the government, the government hates the British Medical Association.

And so, they are in a luxury position in which to experiment with various business models. But the costs are high, and they are rising, and at some point they will need to integrate that somehow.

MR. KELLER: Let me add a detail on the question of the books. You might be charged more for an electronic book, because it did more things. It allowed you to do more with the book, so it's better searching, or moving pictures or whatever.

But there are business models out there, ones that at least not dead yet, if not fully successful that are everywhere from free, read and search for free, pay on a page rate per download or printing, to a monthly charge of $20 or so, so, for $240 one can get access to tens of thousands of books. And other models where an institution has to pay the subscription for an entire institution. It's a relatively low charge per book use.

It's unclear. It's an industry in development I would say, and it's a different experience than searching for information for science from reporting science, a much different animal.

DR. BLOOM: Since the term business models came up, I just want to alert people that the second session is going to be devoted completely to business models. And we have at least one Web question relating to business models that will be deferred to that session.

DR. GARDENIER: John Gardenier. I'm a retired statistician, and in other venues, as Floyd Bloom knows, I have been concerned about the quality of statistics in research. In regard to that, I would like to make a brief endorsement of the New England Journal of Medicine for its pioneering effort to raise the quality of statistical work in its field, and I hope that continues.

That is not what I wanted to talk about here. I think what we are hearing, both from the audience, and from the panel members is that at least for the not-for-profit publishing sector, the electronic medium is going to require a major reconceptualization of the entire process of demand, supply, process technology and so forth.

I want to broaden it even further. Prof. Duderstadt in the keynote address, mentioned the transition now from seeking copyright protection of expression of ideas, to seeking copyright protection and ownership of the facts and the ideas themselves. This became a very serious issue in 1996, with the publication of the European Union’s directive on databases. It has been a continuing battle ever since in the United States.

Several members of this audience, and myself included in a very minor way, have been involved in trying to fight the good fight on behalf of science, education, and libraries. One of the things that I personally learned from that, and other people may not have come away from with the same conclusion is that we don't have much voice, but we have very powerful allied, because everything that we are talking about here goes way beyond science, education, and libraries.

It affects the fundamental capability of a society and an economy to maintain technological innovation. If the flow of scientific information is restricted either by cost or by legalities, the capability of a society to continue to generate technological innovation diminishes, and therefore, it becomes disadvantaged relative to what it was before, and possibly to other societies.

There are elements of industry that recognize this. Now, the reason this I think pertains to this session, I hope, and I will try to conclude here is that it is going to take money, new sources of money, and new sources of ideas in order for the not-for-profits at least, and perhaps the for-profits as well, to complete the transition that will be needed to fully accommodate electronic publishing, while maintaining academic freedom and innovation capability.

A lot of that money can come from sources that haven't even begun to be tapped yet. The National Science Foundation was mentioned, but industry has such a huge stake in this, and I don't mean just manufacturing of course, I mean service industries, information industries, and so forth. They can contribute to foundations. But they will probably only do that if they are included in the audience, if they are brought into the general discussion.

But they have a serious stake in this, a very important stake that is worth billions of dollars. And we, as a community, need to do a better job of outreach to them, and bring them into the fold, and having them help us to resolve these problems.

Thank you.

DR. BLOOM: Thank you, doctor. Anyone care to respond to that?

MR. KELLER: I'd like to say a couple of things. First of all, I would like to say that I think the publishing community and STM in general has gone a long way in its transit to a different place. And indeed, the not-for-profit publishers have been leaders in this whole arena.

Secondly, I don't think there is a stable position to be achieved. I don't believe for a minute that there won't be changes in delivery, changes in possibilities for new kinds of reports, changes in distribution that will mean a great deal to scholarly community itself. So, I see these publishers as having already been quite innovative, and having driven a long way from where they were 10 or 15 or 20 years ago.

DR. BLOOM: Our session tomorrow morning will be devoted to what does it mean to be published, and we'll talk about some of those new forms.

MR. FRIEND: Fred Friend, representing the Joint Information Systems Committee in the UK. There was a consistent message from the publishers that your costs are increasing. What I did not hear was any strategy for dealing with that situation apart from just a few positive comments from Gordon at the end of his presentation.

If your only strategy is to increase the subscriptions paid by the libraries and laboratories, then frankly, there is no future in that strategy. I want publishers to survive, but I'm waiting to hear from you, your strategies for survival.

MR. ROUS: Since we were addressing costs somewhat in isolation, I think that maybe there is a somewhat wrong perspective, rising costs. I think they need to be taken into account together with access and with pricing. So, I do believe that the cost per person accessing the body of research has plummeted dramatically in the electronic world, even with the increasing costs.

MR. BOVENSCHULTE: I would add to that, and which I agree with that as an old ad says years ago, the system is the solution. And I think that we are beginning to see now, real economies. I documented those in some of the data I said in my opening remarks, that we are using technology to make staff more productive, dealing with fewer staff to do an increased amount of work. And I think that is starting to show up. And unless we continue to drive the technology to help us be more efficient, we will in fact not get out of the box that we are in danger of being in.

MR. TIBBITTS: I'd like to make a response that might be controversial. I think that publishers probably shouldn't be in the archiving business. Libraries are probably better positioned to do that. I think publishers are innovating in ways that certainly are creative, and are making them money, but they probably should back off in some of the ways that they are innovating, because they probably should be shared, rather than proprietary.

There are a lot of expenses we are incurring because we are an industry that is not yet viewed as an information industry. We are still thinking printed copy. We are still thinking subscriptions. And we are not thinking products.

And when we all the sudden realize that our value-added might be in the branding of the society, the assistance to the peer review process, and move away from some of these what I will call technologic innovations, the costs will go down, and we can charge less, and then pace it as well. So, I still think that we are in the infancy of learning who we are.

DR. BLOOM: Say why the costs will go down if those branding and other services are provided?

MR. TIBBITTS: Well, collectively, if you take our good keynote, he made some mention of network effects and things like that. There are a lot of different ways of collaborating that, that can bring the cost down dramatically -- I think open access and shareware of various types of search engines and even online systems. There is no reason why we have to have proprietary online systems.

Those are the kinds of things that if we share collectively, there can be funds from grant organizations, governments, publishers can put in, societies can put in. And we can collective probably build a better environment.

What is scary to most publishers about that is they say, where are we? If we give all of that technology stuff up that we have been making money on, where are we? And I think the answer is we actually do have value. We have value in our ability to facilitate the process. We are collectively connected to more of the distribution channels, so there are economies of scale, and using publishing and publishers.

And we add a lot of value in funding as well, and innovating. Blackwell alone, and many of my colleagues at this table, we invest in projects that don't have a pay back for 15 years or never. New societies are born. New science is funded, and that is something publishers add to the community.

MR. KELLER: So, my solution is very different, of course. First of all, I don't think libraries should necessarily support all scholarly communication efforts that are brought to the table. I think it's irresponsible for libraries to subscribe to these big deals where fully 55 percent of the hits and the big deals come from 15 percent of the titles.

I think small societies that want to communication, should communicate. I think we can provide them with the means to communicate. I don't think we have to provide the incredible elaborate overhead that a lot of this publishing entails.

I think the LANL XXX archive and things like them point a way, point one possible solution to this problem. I would be happy if 50 percent of all the scientific journals that are published today disappeared in favor of those articles going as pre-prints if they have been through the cascade of two or three or four rejections from journals, to go into the pre-print archive, and get recognized later on by the number of times they are cited or whatever, before they are selected for actually going through a publisher's hands. I think reducing the flow in half would be the end game.

MR. ANDERSON: I'd just like to respond on this point. There is some risk involved in this. We are guessing at the future a bit. And it is difficult to know whether you are adding enough value to make a difference so that the investments will pay off, or if you are not.

And so I think there may be some strategies for containing these new costs and bringing them in line, but I think our hope is that we are adding enough value that over time, these small risks in multiple channels will pay off for us.

MS. O'NEILL: Jill O'Neill with The National Federation of Abstracting and Indexing Services. The question is for Mr. Keller. You said during the course of your presentation, you suggested that secondary and tertiary publishers are perhaps in a more vulnerable position just by virtue of what they do. And yet at the same time, you were discussing the concern you have over the younger generations coming up not being well equipped to know where to go for print or resources that are outside of the Internet publishing environment.

Given that -- you wear two hats, both as a librarian and as a publisher, is the problem that the secondary services don't add enough value, in which case we have to focus more on information competency to teach our younger researchers how to do those appropriate searches? Or is the problem -- or do we somehow or other have to bring back in better mechanisms for searching and retrieving the precise answer from these huge corpuses of literature?

MR. KELLER: Mind you, I'm actually quite supportive of secondary and tertiary publishing, and contributed to secondary publishing myself. I believe that the secondary publishers in particular are vulnerable, because you are being overtaken by the broad general search engines on the one hand, and on the assembling of peer-to-peer kinds of understandings about what is being used. And by that I mean the sort of feature and function you get when you go to Amazon to buy a book.

You select the book you want to buy. You put it in your cart, and you go to check out, and they say, wait a minute, there are six more books that others who have bought this book have found very interesting. That sort of function could overtake the secondary publishers.

And I think the secondary publishers have got to find some ways of being more effective, more precise, but also more general. It's not all one thing. I don't think you can be one thing anymore. I think you have to look for lots of different approaches. And some of this has to be done automatically.

MR. ROUS: I think that secondary publishers as they are now, are vulnerable, but not because secondary publishing is vulnerable. I think what is happening is that primary publishers, in order to go online, have got to create secondary services. They can't do it without it, so they are in the business of collecting all of the meta data that they can, and presenting it as a secondary service that lies on top of full text archives. I think that second publishing is getting merged together with primary publishing. And especially in the aggregator business.

DR. BLOOM: Anyone else want to speak to that?

MR. KELLER: A follow-up would be to say that if we end up with a highly distributed and diffuse scheme, where authors place their contributions on individual servers, then there will be a huge role for secondary publishing.

MR. BARNAS: Ed Barnas, journals manager for Cambridge University Press. The panel is representative basically of big publishers. And I'm not insignificant in university press schools. There are a small university press publishers.

But the question I have is there are certain economies of scale in production for electronics where you develop your systems. Would the panelists address the question of the mid-sized societies with publish their own journals, and mid-sized publishers, this conversion into electronic for the STM field? Because I know that that is not an inconsiderable concern on their part, the cost of getting involved in electronic.

MR. TIBBITTS: I think that I hold out good hope on this front for economies of scale and costs of production, and especially with innovations from Adobe and Microsoft, and simple solutions, that put in the right hands, e-typesetting in China and India and other places, will actually lower the cost for small publishers and everybody, large publishers as well.

And I would encourage simpler, standard formats that we all agree to adhere to, and removing the barriers of very complex sites, which are out of the reach of even people at the size of Blackwell.

MR. ANDERSON: Just to be provocative, I think for a mid-sized society it may be even riskier to stop delivering print. I think that the trap there may be harder to break, because it's such a strong member benefit. And I think those societies will find cutting over to anything a little bit leaner and getting rid of those costs as that future unfolds, harder to do.

DR. BLOOM: I could comment, having completed two terms as chair of the publications committee for the Society for Neuroscience, which is a 30,000 member society. In 1987, the decision was made by the president that online was the way to go, and they were one of the early journals to join the -- 1997 it has to be -- to join the HighWire group. And within two years the individual subscribing base went down by 93 percent, but the readership went up nearly 250 percent, and members all over the world were thrilled to be able to have their information as those members residing in the United States had theirs.

But the society recognized the cost of doing so was considerably more than the one time, one trial cost. And so a segment of the dues, at least for the present time, has been earmarked specifically for the support of the electronic conversion. I think that's as small as the societies are going to get from our panel for this session.

Did you have another follow-up question?

MR. BARNAS: No, because I was concerned more about the societies in more the 3,000-10,000 range.

DR. BLOOM: Unfortunately, we are not represented in this panel, but we may well be in some of the other sessions coming up.

Anyone in the audience want to comment for a 3,000-10,000 member sized society?

DR. KRAUT: I'm Alan Kraut. I'm with the American Psychological Society, actually a 13,000 member society, but a new organization, only 10 years old, with a couple of journals. Over the course of our brief lifetime we have several times gone through the testing of whether we could publish our own journals, and I think in pretty elaborate detail, and even more recently have decided that we can't.

And so, in fact we are a very satisfied partner with Blackwell in a publishing venture. But each several years we go through this algorithm, and simply decide that the risks, particularly for a small organization with modest reserves simply can't be taken.

DR. FRANK: Martin Frank with the American Physiological Society. We have about 11,000 members. The unique aspect of the APS is we publish 14 scientific journals. None of our circulations comes close to what the New England Journal of Medicine does. But we have been looking at electronic publishing for probably 10 years. We published on a go-fer server back in 1993, for those of you who remember go-fer servers.

But I think the reason small societies like the APS can manage to publish electronically is because of the compounding effects of information exchange that occurs at our meetings that we have with HighWire Press. Technologically, I don't think APS could have done it alone. The fact that there are partners in the non-profit scientific STM world that come together with HighWire to create a product that is able to disseminate the information electronically has made it possible for us to get all our journals out there.

MR. KING: My name is Donald King. I just wanted to make one comment, and then ask a question. The comment is that it appears to me that in looking at the journal system, and you look at the resources that go into publishing, that is the labor time, the equipment, the space, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, that the costs are actually going down. And I was glad to see Robert Bovenschulte verify that.

The point is that if you look at the overall publishing cost, and divide it by the number of scientists, the publishing costs seem to be going down. If you look at it from the standpoint of the amount of reading, it's even going down more, because scientists seem to be reading more on a per person basis.

The point here is that it seems to me that what we need to do is begin to look at the overall system, and how one can begin to address that in new ways, get out of the box of the ways in which we are looking at it right now. One of the concerns that I have about this is that publishing has traditionally been a business in which some portions of the publishing subsidize other portions. That is, in an individual journal you are going to have some articles that are not read very much. They may be very high quality journals, but you have a small audience for it.

You have journals in -- Blackwell says they have 650-some journals. I'll guarantee you some of those journals are being subsidized by other journals. And I think that when we begin to look at the future system, that we are going to have to recognize that there are going to be small audience article, but the fixed cost of those articles are going to be the same. And the articles are going to have a large audience. And we need to be able to continue to satisfy both.

DR. BLOOM: Anyone want to speak to that point? I think they all agree with you.

We're going to take the last question over here.

MS. MOLHOLT: Thank you. Pat Molholt, Columbia University. From the library perspective I want to express appreciation to Mr. Tibbitts for his radical or controversial point of view. I don't think that we would consider it in my profession, to be all that radical.

But I wondered also, all of you have said that your IT costs are rising, because you are looking at the need for adapting content to PDA, and new search techniques, and new linking, and any other number of things which you referred to, but didn't list.

And the question is do you have to do that across the board? I'm sort of taking us backward in saying, wait a minute, what about a vanilla version that may in fact satisfy a whole lot of people, who if they need that animated graphic that really shows you the turning of something, then you pay another nickel, another $50, whatever it is, but it isn't that it's completely across the board.

And to Mr. Tibbitts' point that indeed you develop those things collaboratively, so that there is a standard plug in when you need that, that you can have in fact acquired that capability, and if it becomes important to the article you are reading, you invoke that, but not have to pay for it all the time for everything.

MR. BOVENSCHULTE: It is an excellent point, and it's one that we have wrestled with over the last four or five years in our strategic planning, how many innovations, and what cost should one introduce? I've seen some fairly anecdotal research which suggests that what the end user, the scientist who is reading really values is the search capability and rapid access, and linking. And of course some linking through cross-referencing, we are involved in an industry-wide, pre-competitive endeavor that has great value.

All these other enhancements can have value, however, for individual communities, and indeed for individual editors. There is the pressure that comes back to the publishers to do something to compete with what other publishers have done. And let's face it, we are less in competition for the library dollars than we are in competition for the best authors. And we have to make sure that they feel that we have the best or among the best communities for them to come to every day to publish their work. And of course that applies to editors and reviewers as well.

So, it's a difficult question. I frankly think that many of the innovations that we see right now, which do tend to drive up the IT costs, are very little used, and of not great value. On the other hand, it's very hard to predict that in advance of those innovations. And even an innovation today, which is not much used, may turn out to be one that is very valuable 5 or 10 years from now.

So, we are all playing the game of trying things, experimenting, and trying to stay on the learning curve. But if you once get off the learning curve as a publisher, you are in deep trouble competitively.

MR. ANDERSON: Just to elaborate and underscore what Bob Bovenschulte said, we consistently put out a little bit of service, or a full fledged service in response to what we think our readers are telling us, in some cases based on a little bit of guess work.

And while some of those remained not highly used -- that's just a few -- more often than not they take off. More often than not we have thousands of users, and we are surprised consistently at what people want. And then we have to go back and quickly say, oh, there you go. Now we have to go and build that in, and support it and iterate, and improve it, and find out what that indicates about other needs they may have.

So, I think that you would probably find that building out these services, and changing search protocols, and other display results, those things would go away, and not be evolving if the audience weren't there. Frankly, I have been surprised at how much audience there is for us.

MR. KELLER: The truth is that when we started hyperlinking in 1995, no one had done it before. It's now become an absolute standard. The truth is that when we started to insert Java scripts that allowed people to see writer zones being read and reading, when we showed the operation of ribosomes with commonly available plug ins, that people began to use them.

It goes to Kent's point, if you don't have the egg, you can't make the omelet. If you don't have the chicken, you can't have the egg. So, some of these things that are developed on the margin, become quite popular at the end.

MR. BOVENSCHULTE: But you don't want to eat the chicken, because it's laying the eggs.

MR. ROUS: I think that it is a difficult question to decide which innovations to pursue, and which to leave. But the suggestion that there be differential service levels is also a difficult one. We did that ourselves for slightly different reasons, because we wanted to maintain a benefit for membership in the organization, as opposed to institutional subscriptions. And so we started differentiating levels of service, depending on whether you were a member or you were just a patron of an institution that licensed it.

But what I would say about differentiating service levels is that there is a real cost to that. It adds a lot of complexity to the system. And it also adds a lot of complexity for the end user, and a lot of trouble explaining the differences to the different users.

MR. TIBBITTS: Just a quick re-underscore of this is the transition from publishing to information. I think that the information industry has had to deal with this very difficult, rapid evolution, rapid development of IT strategy, and even having to work on cannibalizing the very thing you are developing in order to develop the next thing.

Publishers would probably be much better off relaxing a little bit, broadening their scope, looking out to another industry that has gone through this, and starting to embrace some of the methods that the IT industry uses to standardize. They are much more collaborative. They work in much broader partnerships.

The difference between where your vendor sits is that as publishers like to call them, and your partner sits, is the difference between me and somebody sitting out on the street and publishing, and somebody sitting right next to me in the IT industry. I think we have a lot of work to do to catch up. And when we do, we will lower the cost.

MR. KELLER: But Gordon, name an industry that innovates faster than the IT industry.

MR. TIBBITTS: None.

DR. MILLER: Lenny Miller from the Endocrine Society. This is very brief, but I just had to point out that it's my observation that while we are all publishers, or most of us are all publishers in this room, not-for-profit society publishers, commercial publishers. Even the not-for-profit society publishers, all of us different business circumstances.

As an example, the Endocrine Society has four journals, 10,000 members. We are rather tied to our print journal right now, or our clinical journal as we get $2 million of pharmaceutical advertising in it, as opposed to say the Journal of Neuroscience.

We also don't get nearly as much revenue from our annual meeting as does the Society for Neuroscience. So, different business models, different business circumstances, I think we all have to keep that in mind.

DR. BLOOM: That's a perfect segue for what I was going to say, which is that session two, which will start at one o'clock, will deal with business models for the publications.

[Whereupon, the meeting was recessed for lunch at 12:10 pm, to reconvene at 1:00 pm.]

DR. SHORTLIFFE: Thanks very much.

Now we will resume with our second panel for the afternoon. We heard about costs this morning, and now the business models that relate to those costs. Our moderator and member of the steering committee for this session is Jeff MacKie-Mason from the University of Michigan. And he will be introducing his panelists shortly.

We do have one fewer speaker. One of the speakers on your list is unable to be here because of illness, and we apologize for that. That is Aaron Edlin from the Berkeley Electronic Press at UC-Berkeley. But the other speakers have gracious agreed to expand their comments.

So, I'm going to turn things over the Jeff, and let you get things started. Thanks, Jeff.

Agenda Item: Panel 2: Publication Business Models and Revenue - Moderator: Jeffrey MacKie-Mason, University of Michigan, Opening Remarks

DR. MACKIE-MASON: As Ted said, our lead speaker unfortunately is ill, and was not able to make it, Aaron Edlin, which is unfortunate in a couple of ways. In particular, he was going to bring a very interesting perspective, as he co-founded the Berkeley Electronic Press, a recent new entry in the derby of electronic presses sponsored by societies and universities that have merged in the last few years.

What we are going to do is the following. I'm going to give about a five minute introduction, which I wasn't really planning to do originally, very superficial, just to frame the discussion, and then we will go directly to the panelists. I have given them a few extra minutes each, although we are going to still reserve a good half of the time for discussion amongst the panelists, and discussion with people on the floor, and with people who are participating through e-mail and the Web.

Why business models and revenues? Well, actually I don't need to explain this probably after the first session, or for that matter, all of you knew that before you got here anyway. Scholarly publishing in any medium requires substantial resources beyond the content creation costs.

My impression was in the early nineties when digital publishing started to become a serious possibility, and started to see some serious activity, there was at least some confusion about this in some corners of the scholarly publishing community. And there was a sense that publishers didn't do anything really. Everything was done by authors, and publishers were just valueless middle people who got things out to readers. And as soon as we could put everything on the Web when it emerged in 1994, the publishers could go away, thank God.

Now, that's of course simply not true, and there was a fair bit of talk about that this morning, that publishers of course are value-added providers, and provide some very crucial value in terms of producing documents in whatever medium, doing the editorial work, doing the design work, doing the marketing, getting readers connected to writers and so forth.

So, all of those involve costs. And in fact, most of the costs are not the paper or the distribution of paper. So, any vibrant, successful publishing system has to recover costs. Even a not-for-profit has to at least make its costs, and have some sort of reserve. And the for-profit firms need to get a return on their investment.

So, this session is going to be devoted to a discussion of sources of revenue, types of revenue, ways of raising revenue, different business models, particularly in the world where digital publishing is becoming much more the norm.

So, our defining question for today's session is how to organize delivery and rights management across modes in access so as to recover production costs and induce ongoing investment in development. There was a fair bit of talk about that this morning, as well. That more so than used to be the case in traditional publishing, new technologies are emerging all the time, new forms of delivery, new forms of access, new types of services are being provided.

And that requires an ongoing stream of investment costs, things that as Bernie Rous put it, once were thought of as one time costs. You set up a system. Those types of set up costs are actually part of the ongoing cost of the system now, because it needs ongoing development and continuing investment.

So, to break this down a bit, what are the sources of value? Revenue is simply a transfer of value between parties. It's getting the value out of somebody, some of what they value the content for, and getting it to somebody else who delivers it to them.

So, to address a business model, particularly to start thinking outside the box and think about changing frameworks, we need to think about who values the publications in the first place, or the information delivery, who might be willing to share some of that value back to the providers and the distributors and the deliverers -- teachers, public and private researchers, students, practitioners, general public, and so forth.

Another question is where to collect that value. Where to put the toll booths if you will, and what way to organize extracting value from some of the stakeholders, and transferring it to some of the providers and distributors. Is it universities?

We heard that more and more of the traditional publishers are focusing on library subscription models as their primary mechanism of collecting revenues, public and private labs, workplaces, practitioners, for instance the medical practitioners who subscribe to the New England Journal of Medicine.

There has also been an increasing question about the delivery of scientific materials to developing countries, and a question about whether or not those should be delivered for free as part of an expansion of access to knowledge around the world, or whether they should be contributing as well in some fashion.

Who are the providers? Who are the potential toll collectors? There are really a number of different services that go into the publishing process. It isn't necessarily a publisher who provides all those services. And so one of the questions is are those services going to be provided as a bundle by a single service provider, or will they be multiple different providers providing overlapping services who will need to recover their costs, and provide different aspects of access to information content?

The business models depend on how the information is accessed, and what the information is. Again, in a digital world we no longer need to have a single standard mode, a journal. We can think about breaking up the information in lots of different ways, and repackaging it and distributing it in different combinations.

This is often referred to as the unbundling and rebundling phenomenon, that the corpus of information can be broken apart into its constituent pieces, particularly if it's been nicely organized, with a good mark-up language, good tagging system, and then repackaged in other ways. So, we can sell by the view, by multiple views, by time periods of viewing. We heard discussion about some of those this morning.

There can be charges for printing and file usage, as opposed to merely viewing usage. You could allow people to keep local electronic copies for rapid access and local archiving, or there can only be server copies. It's a question of whether you can search the full text, or the image only.

Again, I remember Bernie Rous mentioning this morning that this is an issue that his organization has faced as a membership organization. Which services to provide to the general public, and which enhanced services to provide to members in order to induce them to become members, where there might be other benefits of having a membership role besides paying for the publications.

What role for government revenue? An awful lot of what we are talking about, science, technology, and medical information and scholarly research, is information that benefits the general public either indirectly or directly much beyond the community of scientists and scholars who are using it directly.

So, there is a public interest in the dissemination of knowledge, in addition to the creation. Of course, governments in most countries are one of the main, if not the main source of funding to create the knowledge in the first place, to fund our research. But with variations, they have not been one of the main providers of the direct facility of doing the dissemination of information.

Ultimately, at some level governments are often paying for it through subsidies to universities and so forth, to pay for the libraries. But there is a question about whether the government should be directly intervening and providing access, and providing the revenues necessary to do the publishing.

Given a certain amount of value in publishing that is extracted, there is value both in the content, the information, but also in the publications, the value-added services that publishers, disseminators, aggregators, distributors provide.

There is a question about how different business models might do at supporting both aspects of the process, both the content creation, getting incentives to generate the knowledge in the first place, and getting reasonable incentives to provide high quality publication, dissemination, indexing, and abstracting services. So, having a particular business model that may address some of those needs, may not address others.

And then finally, of course the overriding question for this entire symposium, much less this session is what impact the digital publishing world is going to have on the production of science itself, and the engagement in science. So, that's the overall question. For instance, the different business models, the different ways that access is provided and restructured, which of course is a crucial aspect of extracting value from somebody. You have to withhold something from them if they don't pay you for it.

How is that is going to affect collaboration at a distance, which is an increasing mode for research around the world, access for developing countries, the professional review and career process, peer review, and other aspects of that process?

So, with those remarks just to set a big of a framework, I'm going to turn it over to the panelists, who are all experts. I want to introduce them initially, because I want you to get a sense of the diversity of people we have here, and how they fit together, rather than one-by-one as they come up. And then I'll just name them as they come up.

We'll go in the order on the program, in part to help the people listening via the Web. First is Brian Crawford. Brian is vice president and general manager for life and medical sciences at John Wiley & Sons. He himself is a scientist. He has a PhD in biochemical and biophysical science from John Hopkins University.

Joe Esposito is the president and CEO of SRI Consulting, which is the lead publisher of syndicated research for the global chemical industry. Before that in recent years he's been the CEO of the Encyclopedia Britannica during the time that it went digital. He has been the president of Merriam-Webster, so he has a long and very prominent career in publication of scholarly and teaching materials, and has been a leader in the development of business models to go digital with those materials.

Wendy Lougee is the university librarian at the University of Minnesota, formerly the director for Digital Library Initiatives at the University of Michigan, and is responsible for the PEAK project, one of the main participants and partners in the development of the JSTOR project, which in part is hosted at Michigan, and a number of other digital initiatives.

And Patrick Brown is a professor of biochemistry at Stanford University. He is the co-founder and co-director with Harold Varmus of the Public Library of Science.

So, it's a very distinguished panel. We are fortunate to have them here, and I appreciate them coming, and we'll start with Brian.

Agenda Item: Comments by Panel Participants - Brian Crawford, VP and GM, Life and Medical Sciences, John Wiley & Sons

DR. CRAWFORD: I'm pleased to represent John Wiley & Sons here today. And I would probably be best in talking about business models for online publishing to take you through a bit of the process that got us to the business models that we have come to with our online platform Wiley Interscience. So, do forgive me, some of these slides might appear to be a plug for Wiley. It's my best way in getting information across to you, so you can know how we have come to those business models.

First, I should mention that Wiley is a global, independent publisher established in 1807. We heard the remarks this morning about Thomas Jefferson. We were actually established during the time of the Jefferson presidency, while Lewis and Clark were still making their way West. So, we do consider ourselves an innovator in that we are still here today, and talking about electronic publishing in the days after the quill pen.

STM for Wiley is one of three major areas of publishing. We also publish in higher education, and professional and trade parts of the business. It's a fairly diversified publishing portfolio. We are a company of about $1 billion in annual dollar turnover. We have 400 journals now online in our Wiley interscience platform. It was established in 1997. It now contains about 2 million pages of content in the sciences, technology, and medicine.

We started from the beginning with a model that said there should be open access to tables of content and abstracts first, as a general principle. That was so that information would be able to be found easily via the Web either through secondary information services, or directly by users who are browsing for such information, and coming in directly to our service.

Recognizing the power of hyperlinking, we phased in HTML format of presentation along with PDF. And one bit of information to share just from the technology side is that when we look at the usage of journal articles in PDF versus HTML format, it is almost a 10 to 1 PDF versus HTML usage.

So, if one were really going to be serious about cutting costs, one could argue that the HTML implementation that many of us have embarked upon, which is rich with its hyperlinking capability, actually is being underutilized by our audience currently. So, it's a matter of whether we are looking towards today's implementation or the future.

Each journal has its own home page. The reason for that business model is that we do publish on behalf of many learned societies. And even those journals that we ourselves own, want their own distinct identity online. From the outset we also saw the advantage of a rich integration of links to and from related material.

HighWire certainly led the way with this, with their toll-free linking capability that they demonstrated with professional societies. Other publishers followed suit in pretty quick fashion. And I think it was quite visionary, the establishment of the cross referencing service. And of course we all benefit in the biomedical area tremendously by the linkage provided by PubMed. So, it's be found is the first aspect of the business model.

Content and usage now, 250,000 articles across those 400 journals, 100 plus of them are in biomedicine, and they are linked to PubMed. We also publish laboratory protocols on the Web. We have about 12,000 contributions now from major reference works that have been placed online. We have been moving our books online, with 300 online books per year, moving from really a parallel path of publication in print, as well as online.

The platform itself has about 400,000 users that have chosen to register themselves. Registration is optional as a business model. Many users come in via IP address recognition, and do not choose to identify themselves.

The service is now getting about 3.6 million article or chapter views per month, and over 12 million user sessions per year. The second message then about business model was we wanted very much to drive usage, and encourage pathways in for that use.

The next aspect of the business model, and it's important I think, to distinguish in connection with some of the debates about preferred business models is that ours is very much a customer or reader pays model of delivering the content. As a result, we place a great emphasis on sales staff worldwide; sales staff that we did not in a conventional print environment, where we were marketing via direct promotion to scientists. And libraries customarily took print subscriptions, and didn't require sales representatives to meet with them to negotiate electronic licenses.

This just shows you how many staff we have now dotted around the globe. It's a cost consideration of course, but it was important in driving the kind of revenue model we knew was necessary to securing electronic publishing.

We also stressed with our customers, and we embarked upon a development of licenses, very much in consultation with our major institutional customers, flexible sales options. We did not want to deliver up any one preferred option so early on in embarking in electronic publishing. So, we went for print and online options, very much offering either/or, or both.

Basic and enhanced access licenses. Basic for us means title-by-title access, some concurrent user restriction, and often is an option that is suitable for the smaller institution or department. Whereas, our enhanced access license does not require that an institution take all Wiley titles that are available electronically. That institution can pick or choose. But it is establishing a license for a larger body of work, less concurrency, actually no concurrent user restriction, additional benefits including negotiated price caps.

Individual and society member access privileges we determined had to be instituted in parallel with institutional sales models, because we do cater to an individual audience, that as others remarked this morning, is actually declining because of the benefit of access through institutional licensing, but very much to a member audience that is actually holding steady, if not growing, particularly for some of the smaller societies that we deal with.

We have been licensing access to journals online since 1999. The service launched in a non-commercial phase in 1997, as I pointed out before. But this just gives you an indication of the kind of growth that we have achieved in securing our revenues for Wiley, our journal publishing revenues this is, under electronic license. This means the percentage of our total journal business that is secured by electronic license.

And that came very much as a result of that sales effort worldwide, but also the receptivity of the customer base, the primarily institutional library base to making that switch to electronic resources. I must say that this is not an E-only shift though. It's very much an in parallel purchase. For the most part, institutions are choosing to retain their print until there is a permanent archive solution.

The other part of the business management or business model is an emphasis on customer relationship management, direct relationships with customers. The business model has shifted away from selling solely through subscription agents as intermediaries. We are dealing often directly now with our customers.

Seeing our customers as partners, rather than simply as targets. Using librarians as a channel to end users. Customer training to promote usage, something that I think we all need to do more of. And importantly, customer loyalty to sustain business growth.

The Wiley interscience access for institutions is primarily IP address access. And this comes with a cost then of not being able to necessarily identify precisely, the characteristics of every user who has the benefit of the service. But also we enable go anywhere, a password access for society members and individuals, recognizing the roaming nature of the professionals that we are dealing with.

And then finally, constant emphasis on an investment in features and enhancements. Contents alerting, in order to apprise our audience of what is being published. Delivery of content to mobile edition platform. Publishing in advance of prints online. Our service is called Early View.

And then also in order to move beyond a pure subscription model of access, something we called Article Select. The sale of digital tokens to our licensed customers that enables them to distribute those tokens to their users within their institutions to access content from journals that they do not subscribe to. The usage of those tokens then can be used to determine what journals might be added to that institution's collection on a subscription basis going forward. And we have now expanded that capability into a purer pay-per-view by e-commerce offering.

That's a quick run through of the business model. I thought this audience might also appreciate then what had come as a result of that kind of model. Because I think many not-for-profit organizations are early in the curve of offering similar kind of sales emphasis for institutional licensing, whereas commercial publishers, fewer in number, have actually undertaken such licensing more aggressive in recent years, and I think it has caused some debate about this so-called big deal.

Our enhanced access licenses are now in excess of 1,000 institutional or consortia customers. That's not those who sign the license. That is those institutions who are part of such consortia. I don't want to have you think otherwise. As I said before, it constitutes about 70 percent of our e-license business. That is what is coming from the e-enhanced license now. Unlimited multi-site access to content all the way back to 1997, preferred pricing, multi-year contracts, and we give those users usage statistics.

I won't take you through the details of this. This is a pretty easily comprehended pie chart. It just shows you how the customer type breaks out worldwide, or how we have penetrated that larger institutional licensing market.

Basic access license (BAL) customers told us a very important story. There are many institutions that are not prepared to make the move to the so-called big deal. In fact, we don't even like to use the term "big deal"; 3,000 plus customers still taking a title-by-title electronic access represents 30 percent of our e-license business.

Fifty-six percent of those customers that we used to offer this sort of access to free in connection with their paid print subscription converted to a paid online model when we said the electronic privileges would be for a fee, and no longer offered as a bundle. Again, this is a title-by-title licensing offer. We elected later to unbundle the electronic and print sales.

We enabled click on license activation for ease of customer enrollment. And these are typically a one year term with automatic renewal. And the invoicing is often in connection with our invoicing through subscription agents.

Here, you can see a very different profile though of the type of customer that has opted for this. And there is certainly a pattern of migration from the BAL customer category into the EAL category when they know that their online usage is substantial enough for them to make a longer term commitment.

There is also a difference in uptake so far of licensing in electronic form. This just gives you a breakout of the BAL and EAL model by geographic region for Wiley, with initially North America far outstripping other parts of the world in the overall uptake, although as we have all heard, the economic conditions in North America are now preventing the kind of rapid growth that we were seeing in the North American market. But certainly, good representation of online uptake in other parts of the world, with Asia being seen as a growth market. It has certainly emerged.

I will take you through just quickly the license terms, so you can make the distinction between the business models here. The basic access license tends to be a single site, one geographically contiguous building or campus. There is activated e-access for each subscribed title, and it's one concurrent user per print subscription if the institution holds a print subscription.

The enhanced access license tends more to be multi-site, multi-national, and suitable for large consortia, unlimited concurrent users. And there is access to all subscribed current content, as well as back content, privileges such as article select, roaming access, and monthly usage reports. And one change from when I originally prepared these slides is that we now offer the article select capability for our basic access licensed customers.

I have gone quickly through Wiley's approach to a business model for electronic licensing without mentioning though that we also offer free content, truly free from the time of publication to developing countries. In biomedicine we embarked on this as part of the Hinari program with the World Health Organization, in order to get content into the hands of investigators in parts of the world that truly cannot afford such information.

I think it's important to state for the record that Wiley's participation in that, like other publishers, was seen more as philanthropy, reaching out to provide information where it is very needed in order to provide medical care in struggling parts of the world, and not as way of seeding a market. Because in the parts of the world that are served initially by WHO in Hanari, are not seen as being markets in the near, and certainly not even medium term.

We also offer licensed terms for individuals, what we call a personal access license, providing personal subscribers electronic access on a subscription basis; society member access, with members being given access to their subscriptions on terms that they agree with their societies, and of course complementary access to chief editors and members of editorial boards.

I think rather than going now into the aspects of how the technology works, I will that for the question and answer session, in the event that anyone wants to know how that model works for us.

But I do want to take a few minutes, if I still have time, Jeff, to talk about the distinction between the paid access model that I have just run through, and what I would call the author paid model that some who are advocating more open access to the literature, have put forward as an alternative model. And why we have not elected to go that route, and why most of the society partners that we publish with are quite chary of that as well.

And the distinction I think is best put by something I think I read on the Web actually, out in the open, by Hal Varian, an economist, who has pointed out that any economy system tends to favor the entity that pays. And so given that the bedrock of scientific communication is the peer reviewed literature for original work, our view is that any system that charges the author or a sponsor of the author in order for that author to be published is, in terms of an economic system, going to favor the author's desire to become published.

There is nothing wrong with that, but one has to accept the consequences of that. So, I think that what has evolved in scientific communication for the most part is a system where the reader pays, or an agent for the reader is paying, because that naturally introduces a selective filter that helps any entity wanting to scrutinize the validity of the work, but also the value of the work, know that it has passed muster.

It doesn't mean that peer review cannot exist and certainly support a system where the author is paying. But I just offer one sort of provocative example of why I think it is counter to the sort of publishing we do, certainly in biomedicine. That is one never hears anyone proposing that a pharmaceutical firm should fund the Food and Drug Administration to evaluate a new drug for approval, because that system of checks and balances is necessary before bad drugs get out on the market, and in order to prevent bad drugs from getting out on the market.

Similarly, I think that we have to be careful that bad science does not get out on the market. That doesn't mean that work that has been peer reviewed as a result of author support can't be valid. But it means that the value proposition, the value of the information would be altered by such a mechanism.

So, when we talk about value of information, we tend to debate how much the sale value of the information is worth, and sometimes get caught up in the sort of discussion we were engaged in this morning about the cost of actually producing that information.

And I would propose that in undertaking any study at the academy level in looking at the value of scientific information, one should not be led down the path of assessing value on the basis of information, of the basis of the cost to produce it.

Instead, the value of the information is its value as a tool, as a productivity multiplier in society. And there, one could argue that scientific information when peer reviewed, and when selectively filtered, has tremendous value to the author, but also has tremendous value to society. And that that kind of selectively filtered information is that productivity multiplier.

So, in just opening up the discussion today about business models that are in place, we have very much supported an reader or a customer pays model for the business, because we think it ultimately enhances the value of scientific information for those who should value it most.

So, with that, I will turn it back over to Jeff, to introduce the next speaker.

[Applause.]

DR. MACKIE-MASON: Our next speaker is Joe Esposito.

Agenda Item: Comments by Panel Participants - Joseph Esposito, President and CEO, SRI Consulting

MR. ESPOSITO: I'll be working without slides here. What I want to talk about are likely strategies for commercial publishers. I am here as a representative of the commercial publishing industry. And I hope that by making this admission at a conference of this time, I'm not taking my life in your hands here. It's a risky business to be a commercial publisher in anything touching the academy today.

I hasten to add that I'm not currently involved in the publication of academic research, although I have been in the past, and I do expect to be in the future. And the reason I expect to be involved in academic research in the future is simply that there is just so much money to be made in it. And the money is not to be made in the way we have it made in the past, but in the new ways that this information is going to be disseminated.

These are heady times for publishers. There is probably more interesting activity in the industry right now than in any time since the paperback revolution following World War II. And please note that I am using the paperback revolution, not Gutenberg as the turning point. There have been many revolutions in publishing since Gutenberg, the paperback revolution being the most significant, and the one that for the most part I think we are still living in today.

Unlike the paperback revolution, which allowed publishers to grow enormously, and to become very profitable, the current state of affairs is often thought to present more challenges than opportunities for publishers. And indeed, it is not uncommon to hear people say that publishers are an historical artifact, to which one might say, aren't we all, who will be disintermediated by the Internet.

Or we hear that copyright is robbery, and that the model for scholarly communication in the future is the computer open source movement which is giving Microsoft a challenge in the form of Linux. I happen to sit on the board of an open source software company, and this is an area I'm very, very interested in myself.

When you look at some of the more intriguing projects organized around intellectual communities such as DSPACE(?) project developed by Hewlett-Packard and MIT, and I understand that Hal Abelson will be talking about tomorrow, even a commercial publisher has to concede that critical of traditional publishing may have a point.

On the other hand, and I think this is the critical thing, publishing employs a great number of people, and it's unlikely that they will simply go away because a librarian in Nebraska has learned to manage her Web server. These people will be around, and they will be looking for economic opportunities.

I think it's useful to consider how publishers see their own activities, how they will evolve, and what the environment for scholarly communications is going to look like over the next 5-10 years. Many of these activities are already in place, and indeed I have been surprised to hear some of the background on projects during the day today, some of which I will be referencing again today.

We are likely to see these trends accelerate and intensify in the years ahead. And I want to emphasize that I am talking here about commercial publishing. I am not talking about the kind of publishing that is associated with not-for-profit organizations who have a different mission. To anyone engaged in commerce, the only stakeholder is the shareholder, and that is the important distinction between the various kinds of publishing that the people in this room do.

So, from the commercial publisher's point of view, the primary thing to be said about the academic research publishing market is that it is a mature market. By that I mean that there is only modest growth in revenue, making it hard for new players to enter the market.

That may seem counterintuitive to some people, but the growth you see in certain companies is not reflecting the growth of the market segment overall. Indeed, what is happening is that growth is being lumped up on one side where the large publishers are, and growth is diminishing where the smaller publishers are. When you have modest growth, it becomes very difficult for new players to enter the market, and that is the condition that we have today.

Now, there are conventional ways to deal with a mature market, and we should expect that publishers are going to try all of them. We should expect, for example, to see the consolidation among publishers continue up to the point of antitrust action. It is highly unlikely that any scientific discipline will have more than two or three information providers in the year ahead.

Somebody believe there ought to be two or three information providers for the entire STM market, covering all areas of study. I personally am skeptical about this, as there are fewer operating synergies across disciplines.

But the form that consolidation will take may change. In addition to the already familiar phenomenon of Big Company A buys up Small Company B, we should look for the smaller companies to link together in an attempt to become big companies themselves.

We should also expect to see big companies establish distribution arrangements with smaller companies, for example, but putting the content of the smaller companies onto the electronic platforms of the larger companies. Indeed, during the break I heard about just one such deal that is being cut as we sit here today.

Now, by putting those smaller companies on the larger companies' platforms, you get more critical mass, and that's the important thing. That critical mass can be used to shoulder aside the offering of organizations with a small number of publications. And that's where the growth is going to come from. The growth is going to come from shouldering out the smaller publishers, hence more consolidation.

It is not necessary for Reed-Elsevier to Sage Communications, although heaven knows they certainly have thought about it a few times. And indeed, when I talk to investment bankers, it's always interesting, every question is well, is Sage for sale? And it's always the question people have, because it's the next one in the chain. If you look at the STM publishers, and you look at the size of the various companies, Sage is the one that tops out as the one that is likely to be acquired.

It's not necessary for Reed to acquire Sage if they can cut a deal to deliver Sage's publications on the Reid platform, because the impact on the marketplace is the same, aggregation, consolidation, integrated search.

A mature market will also intensify the downward pressure on prices which we started to see in the last couple of years. And this is especially true in academic libraries where the open access movement was created in part, to put publishers under pricing pressure. And I say only in part. I think there are other values of the open access aside from pricing. And we tend to think only of pricing, but the added-value of open access I think is the more significant thing.

Publishers will likely counter this by targeting other publishers, rather than looking for significant increases in library budgets. In other words, we are essentially dealing here with a market share struggle. And this is already happening.

I understand that Reed Elsevier is now offering libraries access to previously unsubscribed journals, not by charging for each journal separately, but by simply insisting in an increase in total expenditure over the prior year. This is a very shrewd marketing strategy, and I would imagine it's making some acquisitions librarians very, very angry, but it is a very shrewd marketing strategy.

In other contexts, this practice is generally called bunding or tying. Bundling will have the effect of greatly increasing the number of Reid publications available through particularly libraries, at the expense of having less well publishers lose those customers entirely. So, when I say we are going to be looking at fewer and fewer publishers in each discipline, this is the mechanism by which that is going to come about.

We should also expect publishers to seek so-called downstream value migration, and I will explain that in a second, and to target competitors that for various reasons, are thought to be vulnerable. Currently, publishers sit in the value chain between authors and wholesalers, and wholesalers have direct relationships with librarians.

By moving downstream, more publishers will attempt to disintermediate the wholesalers, and reap the wholesalers' margin revenue. We heard earlier today, a comment about how you cannot let EBSCO own the whole piece. That is the kind of argument that is going on here.

Critical mass is necessary for this. You can't move downstream without mass. And that's another impetus to consolidation. All the forces are leading to that consolidation. I'm personally skeptical about disintermediation strategies that don't provide significant new value to end users, but having said that, that does not mean the publishers are not going to try it. They will attempt to disintermediate those subscription agencies and wholesalers as much as they can.

What makes one competitor weak and another one strong is a matter of debate, but I believe we are about ready to see commercial publishers more actively target the not-for-profit publishers in the years ahead. And the reason for this is that rightly or wrongly, the not-for-profits are perceived to be slower to respond, and less capable of defending themselves, though they often have substantial goodwill in the marketplace.

But if you think about this, why would Reed want to have a battle with another large publisher. That's not a smart fight. It's much better to pick on smaller players, and I think that's what you are going to begin to see, the large commercial publishers beginning to actively target selected not-for-profit publishers.

Now, there are many perspective targets, but I will just name two to illustrate this. One, the American Chemical Society, and the other OCLC. ACS is a target because of its sheer size. When one looks at the revenue there, somebody will immediately say, gosh, if I could only take 15 percent of ACS's revenue, I'd really be doing well. I'll earn my bonus this year. And that's of course exactly how the discussions take place.

OCLC began a target when it acquired the assets of Net Library, which as a deal, I just say, that was much disapproved of in certain quarters, making its strategy direction appear increasingly to be that of a competitor to commercial interests.

So, thus far I have listed the following strategies: consolidation; bundling or tying; downstream value migration; and the target of vulnerable competitors in a market share struggle. Let's add to these two product-based strategies. One is the creation of meta content, and the other is the shift to what I would call Web services. I mean that in a non-technical sense. Some people call those Web applications. I'm not referring to the underlying computer activity, but rather the relationship of the content to the proprietor.

Meta content is interesting in that it side steps the copyright issue. Content about content can take the form of bibliographies, indexes, and most important of all, search engines. And you can see why OCLC is coming up on the radar screen here.

Publishers are keenly aware of open access publications, and are looking for ways to make money from them. One way to do this is to create search engines for open access content. But even better is to integrate open access content with proprietary content for search purposes. This will drive end users to open content through those proprietary services, because the breadth of materials included will be much greater.

And without being specific, I heard again at the break of a deal that was cut to do just exactly that. So, all of this information is becoming old before I even I delivered it, I'm a little embarrassed to say.

In fact, open access provides publishers with lower costs for content development even as it makes charging for access fees possible. From an economic point of view, copyright may not be necessary for supporting publishing profits.

The real economic response though to open access is likely to be in the creation of Web services, and dynamic substitution for the publication of fixed content and hard copy. Now, in a Web service a publisher provides online stuff, where it manipulates a processes data that is uploaded to it by a user.

In other words, the user has content, moves it up to the publisher, who has a Web server. That material is then processed in some form, and an answer, a response is given back. The user creates the content, pays for that content, and then pays the service provider for the online processing.

Now, if you think of what it means to do your taxes online, that is exactly what we are talking about. To do your taxes online, you go to a Web page. You put in your own data. It is peculiar to your own, everybody's own, his or her own W-2. You upload the data. It then comes back from TurboTax, Intuit or any other online tax service. Where is the copyright in this?

Well, that is where we are going to see more and more publishing go, especially in the STM area. So, it goes without saying that if copyright is threatened, whether the term of copyright is life plus 75 years, or whether it is 14 years is now irrelevant, because the value that is being added is on the processing side, and not on the content side.

One final strategy I would like to address. And this, like the other ideas I have sketched to you, is already playing out in the marketplace. And that is channel diversification. As the academic channels mature, publishers are going to seek new sales channels. The most likely one, and the reason it is the most likely one is because of its size, and also because it is credit worthy, and that is a key thing, for a publisher to find somebody who is actually willing to pay a bill, it will be sales to corporations.

We should expect to see more publishers trying to modify their offerings for this channel. The STM publishers are not unfamiliar with corporate sales, but it's a question of degree. Since businesses, unlike research universities, are profit-oriented, the kind of publications they are most likely to purchase speak to an immediate business need. This is going to tend to shift capital investment away from pure research publications, toward applied research and engineering.

So, looking out 5-10 years from now in the world of scholarly communications, I think we are going to see an ample number of open access publications co-existing with proprietary publications. And we will witness ingenious publishing strategies designed to extract economic gain even in the absence of copyright. The toll collector may have switched positions, but he still has his hand out.

Thank you.

[Applause.]

DR. MACKIE-MASON: Thank you, Joe.

Our next speaker is Wendy Lougee.

Agenda Item: Comments by Panel Participants - Wend Lougee, Director, University of Minnesota Library

MS. LOUGEE: Thank you.

It is marvelously symbolic that a librarian is seated between the publishers and faculty. I think also in a way -- I'm not going to plan to talk about business models, but I do want to talk about cost and value, and the kind of tension that the library world feels as the middle man, if you will, between the business side and the consumers.

I won't be also addressing, for those of you in the commercial side, where the revenues will come from, from the library. But maybe along the way we can say a little bit about the dynamic in the cost side of the library that might feed into this equation.

Now, one thing that has not been talked about, but I think is a kind of behavioral constraint we need to remember, and that is that the convention of scholarly journal goes back three centuries. And it sort of gradually accrued the kind of markers of function of having a place to document discovery, to ultimately disseminate ideas, but also to codify prestige. That was from the beginning, a sort of singular aspect of what it was all about. And that kind of three century convention is not going to be easy to change.

Now, the so-called economy in the middle from a library perspective is really two economies. We buy the content in a market economy, but our users end up using it much more in a gift economy. Content, if you think about it, is infinitely reusable. It can be repackaged. It can be recycled, and that's an awful lot of the business that libraries are in. And we are often caught in this clash between the market and the gift economy.

Now, earlier today you heard about the cost side. And it probably goes without saying, you probably all know about the impact it has had on libraries, but I want to at least make a couple of points about what we have been through.

We have witnessed decades of journal price increases, of course, with the average annual increases for the last five years being around the order of 8 or 9 percent. We are too, also in a very elastic market. And that is that as the prices have gone up, we haven't necessarily withdrawn or canceled journals. Data over the last 15 years show that journal prices went up 215 percent, yet libraries only canceled about 5.1 percent.

The rates of increase are such now that if you look at the higher education price index, the rate of journal increases or library materials now outstrips utilities and health care costs. That's pretty scary stuff.

Now, Mike Keller earlier cited last year's report by Morgan Stanley on the STM market. And it was larger a sort of primer, if you will, for where to put your investments, and also what the commercial side of publishing should be seizing as strategy. It certainly highlighted Elsevier's profit margin of 37 percent in core titles, and 22 percent for the medical titles that it recently acquired from Harcourt.

The report went on though to talk about three trends that were going to be important to watch for the future. One was that there was a cyclic slow down in industry growth due to research library budget cuts, and also the downturn in investments.

Secondly, that there would be benefits of scale increasingly accruing to large players. It was talking in particular about the kind of bundled portfolio of journals that has been come to be known as the big deal.

And lastly, it talked about that the margins will expand for those publishers who have a successful online platform. And interestingly, here it raised in this report to investors essentially, the notion that libraries spend an average of $1.50 on staff and operating costs for every dollar they spend on content. And it is speculated that the saving for libraries in moving to electronic only would be somewhere on the order of 16 percent. I'll get to that later.

So, libraries have been through a whole range of different models that we have seen coming from publishers, and we have seen some of them today, print plus some percentage of the title for electronic, pricing based on size of market, either FTE or sometimes Carnegie classification or something like that. And we have also seen the kind of model whereby campus-wide licenses are large scale. Duderstadt mentioned the 600 percent increase for some reference works, trying to look at a market, as opposed to a singular library sale.

Now, these multiple models often come with requirements that the library sustain its commitment to a level of spending, and give the library very little predictability and little control in the reduction of costs. So, the publishers are experiencing these cyclic effects, and they tend to think they can ride them out. But there also has been this transition, with the expectation that the level of commitment will stay as it was.

Now, this past year I think we have seen two trends that are interesting to watch. The first is that the publisher strategy of the big deal, the multi-year all titles approach has begun to unravel, and we have seen a number of major libraries withdraw from that, largely fueled by budget reductions. But also, we are increasingly beginning to see that Mike Keller referenced, that a lot of the titles simply just are not used.

The beginning to push for much more finely grained models whereby we can select the content that we want. And not only at the title level, but some other kind of bundling, much like the tokens that Wiley mentioned here.

I think we also have seen in the big deals, pricing that is very hard to articulate to our user community. I know at Minnesota when we worked with Elsevier to back out of our big deal, it was hard to explain that reducing from 750 titles to 650 titles, and moving from two formats, print and electronic, to electronic only would result in a higher per title cost. That's an interesting phenomenon.

Now, a second disturbing event this year, and it has been alluded to by several speakers, is the demise of some of the other middlemen, that is the serial vendors. We had at least one major incident of a serial vendor go belly up, along with the $73 million from libraries that had already been taken in. But it raises the question about where the functions of procurement and distribution will go. That is actual work that has to be accepted by someone.

Now, the bottom line is first of all I don't think there are any prospects for increased revenues from libraries. Library budgets, while a major source of revenue for publishers, certainly are either flat or diminishing. We'll also see volatility in the publisher marketplace continue, and we probably will see a real push from the library community for these more finely grained models that allow us to make some choices.

Where we'll also I think begin to see questions about where there might be other models for getting revenues of the higher education institution, and interesting too that seemed to come up most often are probably unlikely as well.

There was a recent survey of ARL libraries that showed that very, very few derive any income from indirect costs on research. Or if they do, it's not done in proportion to their attributed costs within that model.

Another model that has been increasing for library support has been library fees or information technology fees. But both of those come from a student body, largely undergraduate, and are not likely to map well to the cost of research publications.

I want to move from talking about the cost side and the publisher relations side, to talking a little bit about the changes in content, and what it might do to the kind of models that we have, and the costs that we have within libraries for supporting content.

Now, we know that it has been changing in its very nature, often becoming more dynamic. I think we have also seen that there are data indicating that much more intensive use is likely to be witnessed with electronic content. There are also recent studies of university users nationwide, one from Outsale, and one from the Association of Research Libraries that have revealed an overwhelming preference for electronic format.

Nearly half of all faculty in most disciplines reported they use online for the majority of their work. In biological, physical sciences, and math the percentage exceeded 60 percent of the content they needed was online.

But interestingly, despite that preference, other studies looking at the perceptions of convenience and ease of use show a dramatic gap in terms of how the library performs in delivering that content. Users are citing evidence of inability to really control the content, to navigate it well, to deal with the myriad of different platforms and channels that it comes through.

So, the library is increasingly challenged to turn its attention to how to knit together the chaos of the network, and how to deal with this shortcoming. How to penetrate the so-called deep web with protocols that will federate the content in a meaningful way.

Now, interestingly, another analysis done by the University of California system was looking at the differences between print and electronic use, and actually put print in storage in order to force the electronic use to see what would happen. And what they found is that the relatively modest number of requests to retrieve things from storage was by and large because the electronic failed to have some aspect of content that was actually in the print, or where the fidelity of some of the representation was not accurate.

This actually is similar to data that we found in the PEAK study at Michigan, where we served all the Elsevier journals in the late nineties, and found that 30 percent of the use was for non-articles. Now, this at a time when many of the publishers weren't converting the whole journal, and still I think some of the major publishers have been unable to migrate the sort of front matter into the electronic realm.

I'm noting these issues of journal integrity, since I think they obviously impact how quickly we can migrate to that electronic only nirvana that was talked about this morning. It's also important when we think about the kind of unbundling that we might imagine, and how we look at those piece parts of a journal, and how they are put forward.

I want to make one last point about how content is changing, and it's perhaps a subtle trend, but that is I think we are seeing a shift from our concept of publication as product, to the notion of publication as process. And I think we can see a number of examples in the environment where online discussions really have the form of being an actual publication, if you will.

But for libraries who deal in the business of managing copyrighted, that is fixed works, that presents a real challenge. And I think it's a challenge too, to the sector in terms of pricing, how you develop models that support something that is not fixed or well bounded.

There is a marvelous book by an anthropologist that goes to live among the physicists. It's called "Beam Times and Life Times." If you haven't read it, it's wonderful. But what it does is really shed light on how the physics community migrated into the e-print form. And it talks about how the e-print, the sort of early sharing of information is really the form of documenting what is going on, as opposed to the formal publication that occurs months later, which is seen as a ledger to give credit and debits to the scientist.

Now, if you see that divide between content and publication begin to occur, what's the role of the library? And how do we price those two different media? One is the one that is used, and one is the one for future generations. It's an interesting question I think.

So, what should the guy in the middle do? What should the middleman do? What influence do have in affecting change with publishers or with scholars for that matter? The Morgan Stanley report suggests the potential for reduced operating costs for libraries -- no check-in, no binding, no claiming, all of that.

However, the counterargument might be that the necessary infrastructure to support the investment in that content, to federate it appropriately, to insure its longevity, to archive it, all of those things, that's going to be an increased expenditure on the library side. So, what we are likely to see is a shift from if there are any savings, to supporting the infrastructure.

And it underscores how critical it is to have community attention to this issue of infrastructure, the interoperability, the kinds of protocols that will allow that federation to happen.

What influence might libraries have? It's rare that we take a stand. We talk a lot, and we argue a lot, and we complain a lot, but I think the only incident I can remember is when Nature changed its practice a couple of years ago, and began to embargo content, that we actually began to see some cooperative action.

Economist Ted Bergstrom has suggested an analogy with the economic construct of coordination games. And he has a wonderful parable where he talks about the annual meeting of anarchists. And they are used to going to the same hotel, but all of the sudden the hotel decides to up the price, and yet they don't know how to coordinate action to change the venue for the their meeting.

Now, like the anarchists, I think librarians and scholars may be stuck in the context where it is impossible to agree on or organize collective action. Or sometimes when we think about it, we are accused of collusion.

So, finally, I want to make one last point about libraries, and that is we do have a role, I think, in seeding and helping out with the alternative, the competition. We have an awful lot of understanding about content and about use and users. And there are, I think, a number of examples we could point to, certainly, HighWire Press is a marvelous one.

And also, I think there is increasing incidence of institutions such as Cornell and Michigan, that are starting incubator services, production services to help small publishers move to electronic publishing. Actually, Cornell is talking about that this move on the part of the library is a way to move its role from access to information, to facilitating production of information, which is a very interesting shift in paradigm for a library, and it really helps us I think reconceive the relative position that we might have in the food chain that we have been talking about today.

So, at the end of the day, libraries play an interesting role in the middle. We offer tremendous expertise about content and about users, the things on both sides. And the middleman role, while undergoing shifts in costs, reflects I think significant tension and resource constraint.

The near-term focus for us I think is likely to be on trying to get at this more finely grained notion of acquisition, while at the same time developing the necessary infrastructure for the future.

Thank you.

[Applause.]

DR. MACKIE-MASON: Our final speaker is Pat Brown.

Agenda Item: Comments by Panel Participants - Patrick Brown, Professor of Biochemistry, Stanford University

DR. BROWN: Well, thank you very much for giving me a chance to participate in this meeting. I have been to now probably close to half a dozen meetings and workshops on scientific publication, and always I have been in the role of the token concerned scientist. And this is the first time I have come to a meeting like this, representing a scientific publisher. I can't exactly say that I feel like I'm being welcomed into the club here. Anyway, that's okay, I like the outsider role.

So, anyway I'm representing the Public Library of Science, which is a new scientific publisher that was mentioned by one of the earlier speakers. And the business model that I'm going to be presenting is an open access model, sometimes called a midwife model. And it's the business model that the Public Library of Science is going to be using.

Now, Bruce Alberts and James Duderstadt already pointed out that scientific publication I think has always been viewed, and really intended by at least the scientists in universities, and the sponsors of research, and ultimately the citizens whose tax dollars pay for much of the research that gets published, it's traditionally been viewed as a public good.

And I'm sure that we all agree that the goal of scientific publication from the perspective at least of scientists as authors and users of the published work, and from the perspective of the public and the funding agencies that are the intended beneficiaries and the sponsors respectively of the work, has always been to make the results of scientific research as widely available and useable as possible.

And I don't think there is any debate about that, at least I hope not. And none of the important constituencies are benefitted by limiting access or the freedom to use the published scientific information. So, I'm just taking that as a premise that we agree on.

Before the Internet, the hard reality was that we had no choice but to charge the readers and users of scientific publications, because when the information was distributed, the most efficient way of distributing it was by printing it on paper, and delivering it in boats and trucks. Every potential user represented an incremental expense for the publisher.

So, of course, any business model that didn't take that into account was doomed to lose money in proportion to the popularity and success of its publications. And that system has the unfortunate consequence of limiting distribution to individuals and institutions that were willing and able to pay, but it was accepted of course, because it was a necessary evil. And now, with the Internet, that model isn't a necessary evil anymore.

I think the traditional business model also had another indirect consequence that we more subtle, but it equally unfortunate. And that's the fact that the business was essentially based on selling research articles. And that made the scientific publishers get into the mind set that the content of their journals was valuable property that they were somehow entitled to own and control and sell for a profit. And that, I think, is a really big psychological barrier that we now have to overcome.

So, with the worldwide spread of the Internet, I think something fundamental has changed about the economics of scientific publication, not just the technical means. But there is an absolutely categorical change in the economics that is wonderful, because it makes Jefferson's ideal of the infinite, free dissemination of ideas that we heard about this morning, a realistic possible for scientific ideas and discoveries.

And what had been an impossible ideal pre-Internet, to make the published information a public resource, is now possible because the cost to the publisher no longer scales with the number of copies produced, or the number of potential readers of a publication. And that means that we are not restricted to business models that charge per access or charge per copy.

In fact, it means that a business model that restricts the distribution and use of the published work, is really working against the interest of science and society. It is unnecessary and it's anachronistic. And it is also inefficient.

This business model now is what stands in the way of the ideal that we have been working for all along, and is now potentially available to us. So, my view is if we don't need to charge for access, then we shouldn't charge for access.

Anyway, the Public Library of Science is going to be using an open access business model. And by open access, I am referring just for clarity, to a working definition that was developed at a workshop that was sponsored by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute a couple of months ago. And the proceedings of that workshop are going to be published I think a month or so.

Anyway, according to that definition, an open access publication is one that meets the following two conditions. First is that the copyright holder, either the author or the publisher if it has been transferred to the publisher, grants to the public, a free, irrevocable, perpetual right of access to, and a license to copy, distribute, perform -- it's traditional copyright verbiage -- and display the work, and to make and distribute derivative works in any medium for any purpose.

And the second condition is that not only do they grant that license, but they actually make it possible for people to access the work. And they do that by making a complete version of the article and all supplemental materials in some suitable standard electronic format, deposited immediately upon publication in at least one internationally recognized, independent online repository that is committed to open access.

And an example that by no means is the sole example that needs to be used for this, but that exists right now is PubMed central, which is an open access archive maintained by the NLM.

Anyway, the Public Library of Science plans to make everything that we publish immediately and freely available online, both at our own Web site, and also through PubMed Central, and through any other distributor or library server, or any other mechanism that wishes to house and distribute our journals.

The authors will retain the copyright, but they will be required as a condition of publication, to grant to the public, an open access license that essentially says that anyone can read, copy, distribute, or use the published work for any purpose as long as they cite the original source, and give proper credit to the authors.

And for aficionados, and this is actually a very useful resource on the Web, Creative Commons -- I don't know how many of you are familiar with it. It's a project that was launched by Larry Lessig, who is a real expert and a pioneer in digital intellectual property. Anyway, this license is essentially the equivalent of what the Creative Commons group calls an attribution license. And I encourage you guys to check out that site for more information.

By the way, you can see from the definition of open access that by open access we don't mean that we allow free peeks or downloads from the publisher's Web site. We mean that everything we publish can be downloaded in its entirety, manipulated, copied, redistributed, integrated with other data, even resold by commercial publishers. The point is that the content is not the publisher's property.

The publisher in this model plays the role of a midwife, an expert at delivery that gets paid for that service, but doesn't expect to keep the baby.

The advantages of this kind of true open access are, I think, in a sense very familiar to everyone in the life sciences. They are certainly not theoretical. In the life sciences there are two very longstanding, amazingly successful experiments in open access publication, Genbank, and the PDB, Protein Structure Database. I think most scientists will agree that life without Genbank is almost unimaginable, and not worth living.

And the success of the genome project, which I think everybody thinks is one of the great successes of recent times scientifically, and even the existence of the genome project I think is in no small part due to the fact that the world's entire library of published DNA sequences has been an open access public resource for the past 20 years.

If the sequences could be obtained only in the way that regular published work can be obtained, one article at a time under conditions set by the publisher, there would be no genome project. The incredible value of genome sequences that every life sciences recognizes they would be just like other published information, enormously diminished in their value.

So, more significantly I think than the fact that these things are available for any new sequence that comes along. You can compare it to every sequence that has ever been published. The fact that the entire body of sequences could be downloaded, and played with, and manipulated by anyone, used as a raw material for a creative work meant that thousands of individual investigators on their own initiative, on their own dime, took up the challenge of developing the kind of data mining tools that Bruce was alluding to as one of the potential prospects that open access publication would make possible.

Well, this has already happened with genome sequences. And it's those tools, and the new databases that incorporate sequences, and enriched it by linking it to other information that have really made the genome project the big success that it is today. And I think with open access publication, there is absolutely no reason to think that we wouldn't see at least as great a flowering of creating new research, investigator-initiated research using that wealth of published material as a resource for creative work, to add to its value.

Now, the business model, obviously this morning's talk, I think you could compress with very little loss of information this morning's session down to the sentence of it costs money to be a publisher, and I agree with that. I was hard put to actually extract much beyond that.

But anyway, to pay for the cost of publication, the Public Library of Science basically plays to charge the cost to authors and their sponsors. From the standpoint of business logic, I think this is by far the simplest and most natural model. It is natural, because the cost of online publication is scaled with the number of articles, not with the number of readers. So, there is just this beautiful, natural scaling of the cost and the revenues.

And it makes perfect sense from the standpoint of institutions that pay for research. Their mission is to promote the production and dissemination of useful knowledge. And from that perspective, publication is inseparable from the research that they fund.

So, we initially plan to charge about $1,500 for a published article, with no charge to any authors who can't afford to pay, of course. That figure is based both on sort of a ground-up analysis of our cost at steady state, and also a survey of publishing costs from a number of publishers who were kind enough to open their books to us.

And I was heartened to hear this morning that the cost for published article for both the ACS and the American Physical Society were at least in a pretty similar range. So, I think that that's not unreasonable.

I think research sponsors will welcome this model, because for less than well under 1 percent of the cost of the research itself, the results can be made truly available to all, not just for the fortunate few who are at the lead research institutions like Stanford, that can afford to pay for side licenses.

But students and faculty of community colleges and high schools and smaller institutions, as well as scientists in poorer countries, patients -- and there are plenty of them -- who want to, on their own initiative, read about the latest progress in research on their condition, and don't want to pay $30 a pop to read crappy articles about it. So, this model would greatly increase the benefits that are realized from the research investment that those institutions made.

In the short-term of course is an incremental expense, but in the long-term I think once the scientific community has made the transition to open access publication, there will actually be savings to the major research sponsors, since after all, they are ultimately the ones who pay for most of the costs of the subscriptions in libraries, and even individual subscriptions, and since those people then won't have to pay for access.

Well, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) is already one largest funders of scientific research in the life sciences. It has already endorsed this model. And they have agreed to provide budget supplements to their investigators, specifically to cover author charges for open access publications.

So, take this as a carrot, those of you who are in a publishing business. It's money that you can only get if you have an open access mechanism as defined by that definition I showed you before. And it's really deliberately intended as a gesture of how important HHMI considers open access, and an incentive for the researchers to choose that system. And I know that at least other major funders of research in the life sciences are taking similar steps, and we should all be encouraging this.

PLOS is also going to produce printed editions of our journals that we will sell to institutions or individual subscribers at a price that basically is intended just to recover the cost of printing and distribution, everything downstream of producing the published digital document.

We estimate this will cost on the order of $160 a year, but that depends on a lot of things, including the size and the distribution and so forth. If there is a market for the printed journal, which we think there may be, then the print journal operation is not going to be selling the content, but it will just be selling a physical form of the content that some people may find convenient.

There are no cross subsidies between the open access online publication, and the basically break even print publication operation. And that makes perfect sense, because, now that these things are being decoupled, the system is much more flexible. We don't care how well the print publication business does. We'll let the market decide whether it's something people value.

Anyway, in closing I just want to reinforce a point that was made by both of the opening speakers. And that is that again, scientific publication has been touted as a public good. And I think that this ideal, scientific publication, really as a public good, as a public resource, is now within our reach.

And if we as scientific publishers can work together, and work with the universities, the institutional sponsors of research, we can make the transition from an anachronistic restricted access business model that we have now, to a system that is economically sustainable, much better for science and society, that provides free and open access to everyone.

That's it. Thanks.

[Applause.]

Agenda Item: Panel 2 - Discussion of Issues

DR. MACKIE-MASON: Okay, we'll now move into the discussion. I would like to start with a few minutes for the panelists to address questions to each other, and see if there is any discussion there. And then we'll move to the audience, both in the room and on the Web.

DR. BROWN: I have a question for Mr. Crawford, or actually a response. I thought that your argument for restricted access, namely, that it had an important role in maintaining the quality of publications was specious. And I think there are two grounds for saying that, which I welcome your response.

Every study that I know of, and there have been a number of them, that looked at the relationship between the price and measures of quality of scientific journals -- citations, their assessment by peers in the field, and so forth, has found overall, a dramatic negative correlation between price and quality. So, the notion that users paying for journals somehow upholds high quality standards I don't think is supported by the data.

And secondly, I think every scientist, at least in the life sciences, knows that most of the journals that we regard as kind of the bottom of the barrel, third tier journals of last resort that sensibly peer reviewed, but basically publish 99 percent of the articles they receive, have no author charges, but very high subscription costs.

Whereas, the premiere journals typically wind up charging authors in color charges and page charges something on the order of $1,000 or more. So, I think that all the evidence that I know of actually tends to argue against the point you made.

DR. CRAWFORD: I think you may have extrapolated from what I said incorrectly. I didn't say there was a correlation between price point and quality or value of the information. I was making the distinction between two different economic models.

One where the customer or the user is paying, versus on where the author is paying. And saying that there was the inherent bias in a system where the author pays which ultimately would de-value that information in terms of its overall utility as a productivity multiplier.

I say that for two reasons, that a less selective filter would therefore be imposed. And again, that is back to Hal Varian's argument, that an economic system where the author pays is naturally going to favor the author. That means then that any entity wanting to make decisions about that work needs to impose yet another filter at some cost, in order to determine how that work stacks up against other.

I didn't mean to imply though that there is a correlation between the impact of a work, or the quality of the work, or the value of a work, and actual price point in absolute terms of publications. That wouldn't be correct.

DR. BROWN: I think there is that second filter that you talk about. There is no added cost for it. And the filter is that the thing that acts to maintain the quality of the work that authors submit for publication isn't that they don't think they can ever get a paper published. You can always find a crappy journal that will accept just about anything.

It's that they know sooner or later their peers are going to read what they write, and their reputation depends on it being good. And that is ultimately what determines their career advancement, and so forth. So, that filter is already in place. It's not at the level of whether or not a paper can find its way into print.

DR. CRAWFORD: I think most of us who have been in scientific publishing a while would say that selectivity is probably not exercised all that often by authors, because they seek to get their work out there.

But you did ask another question, and that was the subsidy or the subvention of publishing costs by the payment of page charges or subvention say for carrying color reproduction charges. I think it's a good point, and actually an example of where some organizations have found an effective balance.

And that is even in a user or reader pays model, they have implemented certain charges that are passed on to the author, where the needs of the author are seen as unique, and not necessarily overriding the interests of the user, but something that the author would want to pay in order to benefit from a service. Most organizations that I'm aware of though do not make that a criterion of a decision of acceptance or rejection. It's a matter of presentation of the work.

DR. BROWN: I guess my point was that I think that the argument you made at least far from persuasive to me that an open access publication model would somehow undermine quality standards in scientific publication.

MS. LOUGEE: I guess I have a question that I don't think we have addressed yet, although the morning panel did talk about archiving as an important variable. I would be interested from a publisher perspective how you see the incorporation of the long-term longevity, and the economic model behind migration, and sort of unknown cost for the future.

DR. CRAWFORD: With respect to the permanent archive, at this point I would say most publishers, and Wiley is certainly no different from those that I am aware of, have a production stream. And so our electronic publishing focuses mainly on the actual production of the work, and its dissemination via live servers.

We have not addressed each of the important issues that deal with long-term preservation, including the integrity of the information, its migration to new platforms, et cetera. Actually, Elsevier I think undertook a very sensible project with the Royal Library in the Netherlands, where they are looking at a collaboration with a major library that is addressing those sorts of long-term preservations.

Those will be costly, and frankly, I think the costs will need to be shared between publishers and libraries, and ideally with support from governments and other institutions.

DR. MACKIE-MASON: May I ask Pat, for you to address that question as well in terms of what you thought about a Public Library of Science. Your open access definition included immediate deposition of the publication with some organization committed to long-term access. But that commitment of course may not actually follow through.

And one of the advantages of publication in print is that with enough copies out there, there is more or less very long-term preservation guaranteed, which isn't always the case in electronic. You will make print copies. Are you planning to deposit print copies as well in archival institutions?

DR. BROWN: Yes. We have a number of plans for providing archival stability of information, but the point that I would make is that what was important was not only that somewhere there exists a permanently preserved copy of the information, but that it is not only permanently preserved, but permanently openly available to everyone.

And that's why we were emphasizing that archival repositories -- of course I think you would be hard put to find at least a more trusted and trustworthy archival repository than the NLM anyway. And the fact that the information is also going to be freely and widely distributed, and exist in many institutional servers and so forth, I think provides another measure of security.

MR. ESPOSITO: I'm not aware of any publisher who wants to take on archival responsibilities. The debate has to do not with the issue of archival responsibilities, which is a cost, and from a publisher's point of view, a headache. But the question has to do with what period of time must elapse after publication before something is declared something that can go into an archive that a library might manage. And that's where the debate is.

And some publishers -- I have not personally been involved in this debate, but listening in on this, some publishers believe that librarians are trying to put too short a time frame on that, for example six months for all scientific literature has been proposed. And some librarians are feeling publishers want too much time.

But the real issue here is not about the general principle, where archiving should take place, and who should be responsible, but coming up with a number for everybody to feel comfortable.

MS. LOUGEE: I guess my question was not so much directed at that, but rather there is the issue of the kind of durable format, and whether it will migrate, and you're all doing the right thing in that regard.

But then how you incorporate either into the business model, or into some other sort of future business model, the support cost. Whether it's a kind of an escrow situation, whether it is folded into the base cost, but how you look at that, how to price for and account for something that is perhaps an unknown.

DR. BROWN: I just wanted to make the point that it would be a terrible mistake for institutional repositories to agree to take on the job of archiving information without requiring the publishers to grant unrestricted open access rights. To have them take on the burden of preserving stuff that the publisher still treats as their property, I think is really an abuse. So, there you are.

DR. MACKIE-MASON: Let me turn now questions from the audience. I also have two very closely related questions from the Web. But let's start with the people who are at the microphones.

DR. BLUME: I'm Marty Blume. I'm editor-in-chief of the American Physical Society. That's the third APS. We had two others earlier. We have aps.org.

DR. MACKIE-MASON: Apparently, very soon you are all going to consolidate.

DR. BLUME: Psychology and physical are certainly closely related.

I have comments on a few of the things. Let me address the archiving very quickly, because we have put all of our content back to 1893, online. It is linked, searchable, and PDFs are available in other content too. We add to that of course, our current content as it becomes available.

We recognize that there will be costs in changing the format of this in the future. And also, we recognize the concerns of libraries, and in fact, the entire scientific community, that this might be lost. And we use a phrase that we hear on the airlines. In the unlikely event of a water landing. What happens if the American Physical Society goes under?

We have placed the entire archive -- we have a full mirror of it that is actually accessible and tried at Cornell, which is where The Physical Review originated back in 1893. The content of that, by actual measure in the Cornell library, which has all of it back to the beginning, is 378 linear feet of shelf space, going back to 1893, and up to 2001.

Now, we have also deposited this at the Library of Congress. And if we go under, we have an agreement that this will be put in the public domain, and available to anyone who comes along. And in fact, we expect that they will keep this readable in the future after our demise, which we are not looking forward to. So, this is our first stab at assuring continued availability of the archive. And in fact, we have provided the servers for the availability of this, and also we, for some consideration, pay a fee for this at the same time.

Let me mention also as far as open access is concerned. We have an open access model for one of our journals that we started five years ago. It's called Physical Review Special Topics, Accelerators and Beams. It's a small journal, and it is available completely without access barriers.

Our associate publisher will not let me use the word free, because it does cost something to do this. The costs are recovered by subscriptions by sponsorship by ten large particle accelerator laboratories around the world. And it is also co-sponsored by the European Physical Society's Interdisciplinary Group on Accelerators.

We started this because one of our policies is to use something that is on the labels of spot remover. It says try this on an obscure part of the garment, where if it does any damage. Now, I'm also prepared to take Pat Brown's experiment as an obscure part of the garment.

The point is we have other expenses that we have to recover, and we have to watch to see whether these things work or not. We can't afford to bet the whole ball game. We are recovering our costs at the moment.

And the final comment on this, in a published debate in Nature, I did propose that we would like to put everything online without access barriers. We can do this right now if every organization that in fact now subscribes to our journals, would make those subscriptions sponsorships, because we recover our costs right now.

And in fact, then we could open it to everyone else. In other words, don't have an institution say this is available, therefore, we don't have to pay anymore, hallelujah. And libraries would love that, but then we would go under. And in fact if we did this, if we did not recover enough sponsorship in the future, we would have pledge week. Every time you tried to download an article, you have to watch until you get it. So, we will be watching this to see how it works out.

MS. PETER: My name is Doris Peter, and I'm from the Medical Letter. We are a non-profit organization. We are tertiary publishers that publish reviews of drugs approved by the FDA.

I'm concerned about pharmaceutical influence in publishing, and industry influence in general. It's been briefly talked about here. I wanted to know if PLOS is going to accept sponsorship, accept money from industry?

DR. BROWN: That is certainly not in our plans right now, and I think it's pretty unlikely.

MS. PETER: One of the topics I feel a lot of head nodding to when people bring up the idea that industry should be more involved. And from our point of view, we maintain our independence on purpose, because we cannot at all come up with independent reviews of drugs if we accept money from anyone that is associated with the pharmaceutical industry.

And an issue was alluded to in terms of the FDA accepting money from the pharmaceutical industry. They do actually. The pharmaceutical industry actually pays the FDA to review new drugs. So, this is actually a fact.

DR. BROWN: I completely agree with your point of view. I think it would be a bad idea to accept those sponsorships. It's nothing that we are contemplating doing. And I think you are exactly right.

MR. COZZARELLI: I'm Nick Cozzarelli, editor of PNAS. At PNAS, we think that this idea of open access is a great idea. And we hope that someday we will be going there. The problem that we see is the past. We are a non-profit journal. We have no endowment. And we see the difficulties of going immediately to an open access model would be very high. It would be very difficult to get there.

So, my question to Pat is the question of do you see any paths, any waystations that are in between open access and the current model? I had suggested one to Pat earlier, which he had rejected. Maybe I'll mention it again, to see if he has change his mind.

And that is the idea that an author would be given an option for a surcharge. They could have open access of their article, or all the other articles who did not pay the surcharge would be in PNAS free after six months.

But do you have any ideas of some sort of possible intermediate path in between the final goal of open access, and the current situation?

DR. BROWN: Well, first of all, as you recall from our discussion, I think that my objection wasn't so much to the surcharge idea. It was that the amount of the surcharge I think was frankly calculated to be a bit of a disincentive. So, it was more about the details.

I think that's not a crazy model. I don't think it's the best way of doing it. And I should say that I realize the difficulty making that transition. We had to get a large grant to kind of buffer the financial risk for our start-up to do this experiment. And without it, there is no way we could have done it.

So, I think the suggestion that Marty Blume had made with respect to the APS, the thing that was published in the Nature debate, I think actually is not at all a crazy idea as a transitional thing. In fact, it was something that I would strongly urge that PMAS consider. And that is to ask the institutional subscribers that provide most of the revenues right now for most journals, which mostly academic institutions that I think accept the philosophy that they are there for a public service.

To say continue to pay your subscription fees at the current rate for some interval of years to be specified, three to five years, or something like that. During which time we will make the transition to open access. And it may be very tempting for you to say, well, we can get it for free, so why pay?

To ask them to make the commitment to catalyze the transition of continuing. So, now you have a stable revenue source that isn't put at risk by making that transition. And you can try to make the transition, at the end of which time you can see whether it looks like it's going to be self-sustaining.

But I wonder, I think that would be worth doing. I don't know. I would hope that the institutions wouldn't say take the low road, and try to undermine the process by saving themselves a little money. I think that they could see that it's in their own best interest in the long run, to encourage that.

I don't know, that's a proposal. I thought that Dr. Blume's suggestion was excellent. Have you actually considered at the APS, to propose that to your institutional subscribers, at least as a transitional thing?

DR. BLUME: We are having some discussions with organizations in the US to start this. This is unfortunately different in every country of the world.

I could also point out that this not unlike consortium agreements that are made, whereby we can have well off institutions offer to pay a little more, and then we can make it open access for an entire group of institutions. Unfortunately, we have found even close to home in New York City,that the big institutions have said what's in it for us? And they refused to go along with it. They are unwilling to help the smaller organizations.

So, we have made efforts in this line, but so far to no avail. It's not unlike what Ohio Link does, but Ohio Link had something very good. They came along with some extra money that enabled us to open this to the institutions in the entire state. And that is often the catalyst that is needed, a bit of extra money.

DR. BROWN: I think that it might be best to view this as sort of a transitional thing, because ultimately I think the sensible thing is that the research sponsors cover the costs as an essential part of their mission of promoting and disseminating research. But in the short-term you need to catalyze the process.

Would the libraries be open to doing this as a temporary thing?

DR. BLUME: The problem with the temporary thing is where are we if it doesn't work?

DR. BROWN: Well, you can always go back to square one.

DR. BLUME: It's very hard to get people to subscribe. A librarian will tell you that once they have given up the money and used it somewhere else, this becomes a new acquisition.

MR. COZZARELLI: I thought what Pat Brown was indicating though was -- the question was what does the institution get out of it? I thought one idea was that when Stanford ponies up the $5,000, or whatever is the amount, everybody from Stanford has open access publishing in that journal. And therefore, it's a competitive advantage for Stanford to offer this.

DR. BROWN: Yes, I forgot to mention that was some part of the proposal that I mentioned to Nick Cozzarelli. If you treat it as kind of a credit pool that could be drawn on by authors from that subscribing institution, then even in the open access model, they are getting some special benefits beyond what the non-paying institutions are getting. So, there is that incentive.

MR. MC HENRY: This Bruce McHenry at discussit.org again. My comment really falls into tomorrow's session, but I think that it should be addressed here, just briefly. Everybody is still working in the paradigm of the old paper model of publishing, where you have a lot of work pre-publication, because you need the big print run in order to economize on the costs of distribution.

And the questions about archival policy, editorial policy, open access or not all change completely if you move to a model of continuous improvement of the materials, continuous publication. And also where all peers have an opportunity to adjust the prominence of newly developed pieces. And in that model, the world changes completely, and I guess we'll talk about it tomorrow.

MR. ESPOSITO: I think that's the way things are going to go. I think that a lot of the issues that are being debated here are really old paradigm issues. Copyright for example, is not necessarily going to be a useful tool for people working in this area going forward. There are other more useful tools, and more community-based developments of intellectual material is more likely to be the direction things will take.

DR. BROWN: The comment I would make is I think a prerequisite for the kind of innovation that you are talking about is that the materials that are being continually re-evaluated and so forth, be an open public resource. I think it is hard to see how this kind of thing would work practically if you still have the system where every publisher's body of work is in a separate repository.

MR. MC HENRY: I'll just comment on that. There are certain domains certainly outside the academic where that is simply not viable, because people need to be able to earn a living for doing intellectual work. So, you can't make it free and open right away.

However, after some period of time, as the prices go down, foundations, government, corporations can decide to purchase it, buy out the materials and make them accessible within their group or publicly.

DR. MACKIE-MASON: Let me turn to some of the questions from the Web to include our Web listeners. In fact, there are two that are very closely related that have come in. The first one came in, in this morning's session, but was handed off to this session, because it concerned revenue.

This was addressed to the publishers. I assume a good part of your overall revenue is tied to advertising in print. How would this shift to electronic information impact your business models? I guess the presumption there is that the advertising wouldn't work the same in electronic format.

The question that came in during this session closely related. I work for a large society publisher. Nearly 50 percent of our total costs are attributable to editorial, peer review, production processes, things other than printing and paper, distribution.

On the other hand, advertising associated with paper journals underwrites more than 50 percent of the total cost of operation. What would be a viable business model if you were not to charge even more than we currently do for electronic access?

I guess again, the idea being that if we had less advertising in the electronic model, then although we may have saved on some costs, we have actually lost a major source of revenue. So, if the panelists could address advertising, which hasn't been mentioned.

DR. CRAWFORD: I can begin. For journals with broad member or individual circulation, most advertisers still seek print as their means of reaching that audience. So, they are not yet ready to move away from print advertising to online only in scholarly publications. I'm not talking about other consumer-oriented publications. So, it would be very risky to go to an online strategy only for such publications, if any organization currently relies on such advertising revenue.

And the second part of the question I think is answered by that as well.

DR. MACKIE-MASON: Other comments?

MR. ESPOSITO: Well, one, the company I'm running is not currently involved in the sale of advertising whatsoever. Looking out to the future, in terms of advertising in journals with electronic form, I am very skeptical that advertising is going to play a significant role in electronic academic material. And that therefore, the money that is lost to that, is going to have to be found in other directions.

DR. BERRY: I'm Steve Berry from the University of Chicago. I'd like to make two brief comments, and then ask a question particularly directed at Pat Brown.

First, regarding archiving. The comments, the description that Martin Blume made I think makes very clear the distinction between the perspective of the professional society as a publisher, and the private publisher. The professional society has a very strong vested interested in archiving. The private publisher, as Brian Crawford said, really has none.

Now, I wanted to turn next to your comment, Brian Crawford, about Hal Varian's point that you favor the author by charging the author. I think that is absolutely right. And I think if you look carefully, this is exactly what we would like to do. The public good that are produced by scientific research are a very special kind of public good.

In contrast to others, the value of scientific public goods increases with use. And it is specifically in the author's interest. And it's very much a part of the author's motivation, the scientific paper author, to have his product more and more widespread, more and more used, thereby enhancing the value to the community, as well as the interests of the author, him or herself.

Consequently, your quoting Hal Varian, I would say is very much an argument for placing the charges at the author, rather than at the user, who doesn't have a particular vested interest in increasing the use of each written piece of work.

DR. CRAWFORD: Let me clarify that, if I may. I think you are absolutely correct that one needs to optimize two variables. One is the dissemination, and the other is the filtering. And my point is that the author pays model moves the filter boundary. Whereas, publishers also have an interest in disseminating the work as broadly as possible. So, it's a matter of getting the balance between those two considerations.

DR. BERRY: I hear your logic, but I think the facts already indicate, as we have heard earlier, that the quality of articles in the journals is not correlated with the users' charges. If anything, it's as Pat described it, it's inversely correlated.

But let me turn to a question for Pat. I would like to go back to your model about the sponsor-supported publication, in contrast to the author's institution supporting the publication. Many of us very much like that model. I think that in the sense that it is the sponsor of the research who shares with the author, the interest in having the product as widespread as possible.

When NIH supports research, it is because it is going to be published and made into a public good. And consequently, to fulfill the goals of supporting the research at all, the sponsor in a sense carries a responsibility to see that the material gets published. Now, I think the Howard Hughes model that you quoted is a very, very good one. And I think all of us who publish research would like to see that kind of thing propagate.

But do you see any way to persuade the less well funded agencies, right now particularly the National Science Foundation and Department of Energy, taking on the responsibility to pay for publication, in contrast to the present model, which puts the author payment responsibility into a grant in which the author has discretion whether to spend that money for publication, or to spend it for support of another graduate student.

Do you see any way to persuade agencies to take on the kind of responsibility that the Howard Hughes Medical Institute is doing?

DR. BROWN: Well, I'm not sure. I have been trying my best. I'm not sure if I've found a way to persuade them. I guess we'll see. But it seems to me that you could make a pretty good argument that -- I don't know whether the same numbers work in chemistry and the physical sciences and so forth, that the publication costs amount to on the order of 1 percent of the research costs.

But if that's true, if you said well, even if you had to take a 1 percent hit on other aspects of the budget to do it, my guess is that it's pretty plausible that the return on that investment, as opposed to 1 percent that you cut, would be extremely high, because all your grantees, all the research that you are funding, you are now giving freer access to a more extensive body of information.

Not to mention the fact that again, the purpose of the funding isn't so much to serve the community of your grantees, it's the wider world community which will be much better served by the information. That argue obviously is persuasive to me.

On the other hand, I would say that when that issue has been raised with respect to NIH funding, a lot of NIH grantees have been up in arms and said, well, if this comes at the expense of a 1 percent cut in research funding, it's unacceptable to us. There is not enough research funding to go around already. So, it's obviously a controversial proposal.

DR. CAMPION: Ted Campion. I'm the senior deputy editor at the New England Journal of Medicine. The open access experiment is fascinating, and already underway. Open access makes eminent sense, especially for anything of archival value, Genbank being the ultimate example, but also scientific information should become free and open to all. In our journal all scientific articles after six months are open to all.

But the value and the future of any publication is going to be determined mainly by what authors want to do, where authors want to publish. And we are an open access journal to authors; 4,000 scientific articles come to us a year, 0 charge, not even postage charge if they submit over the Web, no page charges accepted.

But part of what we do is reject a lot of them. And if authors have to pay, or their sponsors, is there going to be anything in the way of -- I'm not talking about an archive, an archive a la Genbank or PubMed is a different issue. But something that is taking the role of a biomedical or scientific journal has to be critical, which means being selective. And that's in part why authors want to publish there.

How are you going to exercise those functions of peer review, and of being selective? Or is that part of model at the Public Library of Science?

DR. BROWN: The most attractive journals to authors tend to be the ones that you have the least chance of having your paper accepted by. And so, as it happens, I don't want to go through our complete kind of development strategy. I'm perfectly happy to share it, but I don't think I want to waste the time right now.

But we intend initially to be very selective. Not selective just on the basis of is something good enough that it ought to be published somewhere? But selecting for papers that are likely to be of wide interest to a very wide audience, precisely because we feel that it's going to be important in terms of developing the journal identity as a magnet for submissions.

If your point was that somehow adding author charges is going to be a disincentive to authors to submit to the New England Journal, I think is highly unlikely. I have looked into quite a bit of author charges. I have paid plenty of them. I know what author charges are, to a lot of journals that are very selective. It's not at all uncommon for them to be more than $2,000 per paper, as you very well know.

And in fact, just to look into whether this was uniquely a feature that people are willing to pay a lot of money for a paper that they have slaved over for the past two years, and is going to get published in a high profile journal, how would they feel about paying author charges for a less prestigious journal.

Just in case there is anyone here, I won't mention the journal, but there is a journal that I would say in the life sciences is widely regarded as pretty much the prototypical archival journal. And they don't charge for submissions, but they do charge for color. And it's $750 for the first color figure, and then $500 for the second, and about 20 percent of all the papers that are published in that journal in several issues that I looked at, had color figures, on average two color figures.

So, the authors voluntarily were willing to pay that extra money to add color to their articles published in a completely archival journal. And I will that I would say that in the vast majority of those cases, the colors were primarily just to make it look prettier, and not because it was essential for the scientific content. And the point is that I think when you have put all this work into a scientific paper, and you want the world to see it, people are not in general, balking at paying the money.

But beyond that, I think anyway that if we go to a model where the institutions are covering those costs in the essential part of research, I think that it will make it even less a disincentive to authors. I don't think the New England Journal of Medicine has anything to worry about in terms of going to author charges, but that's for you to decide.

DR. CAMPION: We are not about to.

DR. BROWN: Well, that's a shame, because I think it would be better for the community you are supposed to be serving.

DR. SIMONI: Hi, my name is Bob Simoni. I am associate editor of the JBC, which is a publication of the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. My day job is I'm a professor of biology at Stanford. I'm one of Pat's colleagues. I say that with some trepidation.

Let me just give you one second worth of background. JBC is a society journal. I think it shares the mission of all society journals, that is to serve readers, scientists, and science at large, and to do so in a context where we manage to cover our costs. And we do manage to do that, and have a little bit of money left over for development.

We think we are among the good guys. We have provided content free to Third World countries almost since we started in 1995. We have provided free back issues. We were among the first to do that, along with PMAS. So that on average, articles are free to everyone after six months. The way we actually do it is at the end of each subscription year, each calendar year, everything in the prior year becomes available. So, the average is six months.

And we are putting all our back content online. It's already back to 1966. By July, we will be back to 1905, which is the first year we published. And it will all be available free. So, we think we are serving our members and everyone else really well.

Now, I want to say a bit about business models, although I will confess my colleagues at JBC will find it very peculiar that I am talking about a business model, or anything to do with finances. I would add that the dean of my school would find it even more peculiar, but she is not here at the moment, thank God.

The lines are drawn too sharply, as has come out in the subsequent conversation about who pays. For us, it's I think, somewhat more typical. We charge authors page charges. And on average, an article in JBC costs about $1,000, that's page charges plus graphics charges. What it has done, however, it's kept our subscription price quite low. I think as subscriptions go, JBC is pound for pound at least, the best bargain there is. I know weight may not be the best criterion for quality, but it's something about which we are quite proud.

The thing I think we're most proud of is that we think we're an open access journal, though I see from the current definition that we actually don't comply. What have we done? Well, now, two years ago, prompted to be honest, but all of the discussion that came up with Public Library of Science and all of the rest, we decided to think of some way that we could make all of our articles free at time zero. That means as soon as they are published, they are free to everyone with Internet access.

So, we started something that is called PIPS, or papers in press. And on the day a manuscript is accepted, the paper is published on the Web in PDF, and it's free to everyone. And it stays free forever. So, anyone with Internet access can read every single JBC that has been published for free. Now, if that's not in the spirit of open access, I really don't know what is. And we think we have complied with that spirit really quite fully.

It's been enormously popular to say the least, among readers and authors. The fact that it's published on the day of acceptance reduces the time to publication by on average, eight weeks, which is the time usually taken by copy editing and processing by our publisher.

So, it has reduced the time to publication literally in half, by a factor of eight weeks. Actually, much more than half. So, authors like it, readers like it. I can't tell you how many stories I've heard where someone comes to the lab in the morning. The first thing they do is open the Web site, and look at the 20 or so papers that are in press that day, and they know what's been published in JBC, and I think it has served everyone really well.

Now, I want to say just one last thing about the archive business, and I think it's really a serious question. I have had occasion to go back to 1905 JBCs to retrieve stuff in the last six months or so. And I must tell you, those of you that take comfort in the permanence of the paper record are misled. Those old issues, which I think were published with state-of-the-art technology and quality at the time, are exceedingly fragile.

Papers are cracking. Papers are brown. And if they last another 100 years, I would be really surprised, not that I will care that they last another 100 years. But our back content project is as much a conservation project as it is a convenience project, and it was because of that experience.

So, I didn't have a question, but don't you all agree with me?

DR. KING: Donald King, the University of Pittsburgh. One of the things that we have found in our research is that it costs authors about $7,000 per article on the average to actually produce the article. That is, write it and prepare it, and so on.

The problem that I find along the lines of what Steve Berry was talking about, is that we find that roughly -- these are pretty rough figures -- about one-third of the articles are funded by the federal article, about a third of them are funded exclusively within the universities, and about a third of them from industry. And I'm talking about Bell Labs, because about 25 percent of the articles are actually -- the authors are outside of the universities.

The problem that I see is that in making these articles -- well, there are two problems. One is the argument that Steven was making. How are you going to convince the funders of these authors that they need to put an additional $1,500 above the $6,000 or $7,000 that they are already paying the authors to prepare those articles?

Now, to me, it seems to be an easy argument. But I don't think it's as easy for all of those three different sources of funds. With the government ones, I think you can write it into the grants. And I understand one of the problems that you have there is because if the grant money goes down, and what you find is that about 75 percent of the readings of those articles are outside of the universities, outside of the granting organizations, and so on. And they may not want to pay for that.

But I think you can come up with arguments. But where you are going to have difficulties, I think, is with the people who are writing those articles, by the salaries that they get from universities, or small grants they get from the university, and also the ones from the industry. And I think you are going to have a totally different kind of argument for those three different constituencies.

How are you going to get them to do it?

DR. BROWN: It seems to me that their interests are similar though for all three of those constituencies. Namely, whatever motivated them in the first place to support the research, and to encourage the authors to publish it I think is presumably the motivation to pay an increment of less than 1 percent to make it much more valuable to the people who are supposed to be served by it.

It seems to me that holds whether it is the universities using their own funds, whether it is a company that is supporting the research, or whether it's a government agency. The principle is pretty indifferent.

DR. KING: It may be that you've got to go further in to try to understand what all the transfer of funds are, and look at what they are already purchasing, the universities for example, through their subscriptions, the special libraries through their subscriptions, and so on. And get some notion of what the transfer of funds are. Then once you have those data, I think you might be able to have an even stronger argument for the kind of model that you are projecting.

DR. BROWN: Well, if I could even begin to understand the flow of money within Stanford -- I think by the time I begin to understand, I'll be ready to retire, I think.

DR. KING: It's doable.

MR. BARNAS: Just to preface my comment, I have been involved in journals publishing for about 30 years, first at a scientific society, the American Institute of Physics, then about eight years at Wiley journal, a commercial publisher, then about 10 years at Raven Press, a specialty medical commercial publisher, and since 1995 at Cambridge University Press, a non-profit university press publisher.

And I think one thing about the discussion of business models that is being ignored here is the question of the mission of the organization that is doing the publishing, because that does have a significant impact on the business model and what is decided. A for-profit commercial publisher will seek to disseminate information in journals that are very attractive to the library market, the institutional market to provide them the financial return on those journals.

A non-profit, non-society publisher will seek to disseminate information also, but in a non-loss situation so that they can continue to stay in business and serve whatever their own mission is. A society publisher, however, has a significant investment in serving its members, and in that regard, some of the comments about author support, page charges, color charges come into a different light.

When I was working for the society publisher, or working with societies as a contract publisher in various publishers I have been involved with, various societies would make use of the page charges as a way of supporting their member subscriptions, keeping the member rates low, so that they can give a benefit to the members.

A commercial publisher or a university press cannot really charge page charges unless it's on behalf of the journal they are publishing on behalf of the society, because that is not viewed as appropriate. It's almost as gouging. Color charges, okay, because it's a direct cost that can be seen there, but page support for articles in non-society publications, that's not a viable part of a business plan for a non-society publisher.

Another comment I just want to add in is the earlier comments about the support at institutions. Two issues come to my mind, one which was mentioned earlier, the question of pharmaceutical company support. The Council of Science Editors addressed this last month, and it was depressing, the impact of pharmaceutical houses on medical publishing in that regard.

And if you recall, earlier this year in terms of institutional support, the number of libraries in Massachusetts that have to go through subscription cancellation processes when the state government cut their budgets. So, institutional support is not a guaranteed item, and it's not a thing that you can really look forward for years to come.

Just a quick question is to comment on the mix of the scope of the organization against the business.

DR. CRAWFORD: Ed Barnas, I think all the points you made are quite valid. I think today we were talking somewhat in absolutes. And when I was mentioning a customer pays model as opposed to the open access model that have been proposed as an author-supported model. Indeed, you are quite right in observing that many professional societies have had a hybrid model in place, where they have benefitted from subscriptions at the same time that they have used author or page charges, and other subventions to help support the publishing program, and keep costs to the customer down.

And it's that kind of hybrid model that probably has been determined over time by market forces. I guess one could ask why are we debating now what the right business model is? Many of the business models that we have serve us well, and have been adopted over time.

DR. MACKIE-MASON: I'm sorry to interrupt, but I have to do the thing I least want to do. There are still several of you waiting to speak, but we're over time, and I have to draw the session to a close, and I apologize for that. We started 10 minutes late. We are now ending 10 minutes late, so we are within budget, but the day is getting long, so we have to take a break.

[Brief recess.]

DR. SHORTLIFFE: [Administrative remarks.]

So, we thank you for coming back, and now let's turn things over. We have a tag team of moderators. Two members of the steering committee are on this group, Ann Okerson and Jane Ginsburg, and also Dr. Michael Jensen from Harvard Business School.

So, Ann Okerson is going to take care of moderating most of the session, and we will ask Ann to take over at this point.

Thank you.

Agenda Item: Panel 3: Legal Issues in Production, Dissemination, and Use - Moderators: Ann Okerson, Yale University, and Jane Ginsburg, Columbia Law School

MS. OKERSON: Good afternoon, welcome. As Ted said, my name is Ann Okerson. I'm from the Yale University library, and I'm moderating this session this afternoon.

Our session is called, "Legal Issues in Production, Dissemination, and Use of Scholarly Information," the session that you have all been waiting for all day, I'm sure. I don't know how many of you remember Peter Sellers in that wonderful movie, "Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Love the Bomb." In this session you are going to learn how to love copyright and licensing.

After covering issues related to copyright and licensing by Jane Ginsburg and by me, we are going to move to a description of a community service that has been built in very interesting and useful ways. Dr. Jensen will be speaking about that. It has been built without being based on ownership of any of the publications it makes available, so far as I know, to social scientists. So, that's your treat after you get through the other part.

Our first speaker then to address the basics of copyright for the scientific author in particular is Jane Ginsburg. Jane Ginsburg is the Morton L. Janklow Professor of Literary and Artistic Property Law at Columbia University School of Law. She received her JD from Harvard, and a doctor of laws from the University of Paris. She teaches copyright, trademark, and legal methods. She has authored and co-authored case books in all three subjects, as well as numerous articles on domestic and international copyright law.

I first met Jane 10 years ago through an absolutely brilliant article that she wrote for a humanities journal, which I think changed the nature of my understanding of copyright for all time. So, let us welcome Jane Ginsburg.

Agenda Item: Copyright Basics: Ownership and Rights - Jane Ginsburg, Morton L. Janklow Professor of Literary and Artistic Property Law, Columbia Law School

PROF. GINSBURG: Thank you very much, Ann. Now I'm speechless. I'm not sure I can ever do that again.

I'm going to address three questions about copyright and scientific, technical, and medical publications. Those questions are what rights does copyright establish, in what kinds of works? Second, who owns copyright in scholarly works? Does the academic author own the copyright, or does the university that employs her own the copyright? And third, assuming that the academic does own the copyright, what rights does she end up having to give up in order to get published? And Ann will continue on the third of those questions.

With respect to copyright basics, first of all, copyright protects works of authorship, and that is a very, very broad notion. It includes scientific works. It includes computer software, whatever the medium of expression. So, whether it's on paper, on film, in ones and zeros, if it's a work of authorship, it is protected by the copyright law.

It is important to understand, however, that copyright protects the work, it does not protect the information as such within the work. Copyright does not protect ideas. It does not protect facts. And it doesn't protect genome sequences. So, it only protects the article that describes or expresses the results and analysis of that information, but not the information itself.

With respect to the exclusive rights that copyright confers on the copyright owner, those include the right to reproduce the work in any medium including ones and zeros; the right to make what the law calls a derivative work, that is, the right to adapt the work, with includes updating the work, making further works based on the first work; the right to distribute the work in copies, that includes digital copies.

And a right that is becoming of increasing importance on the Internet, the right to publicly display the work, so that when you see the work on your screen that you are viewing from a Web site. That is a public display of the work, and the rights of the copyright owner may be implicated thereby.

It may come as a surprise to a lot of people that copyright does not grant a right of attribution. There is nothing in the US copyright law, unlike the copyright laws of many other countries, that gives the author the right to be recognized as the author, that gives the author name credit. This is a great failing of US copyright law.

To the extent that authors enjoy this right, they enjoy it either by contract with those who publish the work, or possibly as the result of other laws, but not the copyright law. And there is not really a well established right of attribution at law, as opposed to in practice.

I will also mention that the exclusive rights under copyright are not absolute. There is the well known fair use doctrine, which I shall not discuss, simply allude to its continuing existence.

The term of copyright is now the life of the author plus 70 years. That's a very long time. That is the same term in the European Union as well.

Let me now turn to ownership of copyright. Copyright ownership vests in the author of the work. And that makes a lot of sense until one finds out that according to the copyright statute, the employer of a work for hire is considered to the statutory author. What is a work for hire?

For present purposes, a work for hire is a work prepared by an employee within the scope of his or her employment. Now, that sounds pretty bad, because if you are an employed academic, it might follow that everything that you write belongs to the university, at least if you apply the statute's terms literally.

Now, in fact there has been a long tradition predating the 1976 Copyright Act under which professors own the copyrights in what they write, both in terms of articles, books, and lectures, their teaching materials. And there is no indication that Congress had ever meant to change that tradition in the 1976 act. It just wrote an all purpose provision on employee authorship transferring authorial status, as well as all copyright rights to the employer.

The question has not been settled under the current copyright act, whether the rule is what the statute says, or what the long standing practice had been. Two judges, appellate judges in the 7th Circuit, which sits in Chicago, had suggested that surely Congress did not intend to disturb this long standing practice and understanding. But one has to acknowledge that the two judges who said that are Judges Posner and Easterbrook, both of whom have been very prolific professors, as well as judges, so their statements may not have been devoid of self-interest.

As a practical matter, the question of professorial or academic copyright ownership didn't even come up, apart from these speculations about the text of the 1976 act until relatively recently, probably because most academic copyrights weren't worth anything, as opposed to patents. And universities have had long standing patent ownership policies. Most universities, until recently, had not had any kind of policy on copyright ownership.

That has changed in the last few years. Why has it changed? In part because of the arrival of software. Software is protected by copyright, and it is worth something. So, some universities thought that perhaps they should lay claim to software; not only software written by staff, but also software written by professors.

The long standing tradition had distinguished between works by administrators or staff on the one hand, which were works for hire, and works by professors, which were not works for hire. So, some universities began to lay claim to software.

Another thing that changed was the continuing escalation of journal subscription prices, a favorite topic around here. And some universities thought that perhaps if they owned the copyrights, rather than the actual creators owning the copyrights, they could bargain better with the publishers. But that I think, was more speculation than actual practice.

Finally, and I think has most recently precipitated the flurry of copyright ownership policies that we now have is digital distance education. Before the dot-com bust, a lot of universities I think began to get stars in their eyes about the commercial potential of online digital distance education, and saw this as a potential profit center.

But if there to be so, then they wanted to make sure that the content that was being dispensed via online digital distance education would belong to the universities, and not to the teachers. At least, that was their first impulse.

So, that I think, is what underlies the adoption of copyright ownership policies among a number of universities in the last few years. The star of digital distance education has, I think, sunk a bit since those policies were first in prospect, and perhaps with that, less graspingness on the part of many universities.

What I'm going to present to you very quickly is a cross-section of university faculty copyright ownership policies, divided first into universities whose default position is that faculty own the copyrights in their works. And then universities whose default position is that the university owns the copyright in faculty works on grounds of work for hire, most notably.

Now, I'm not going to comment on every one of these cells in the chart. I would be happy to send these charts to anybody who is interested. For those of you who are contemplating moving from one university to another, there could be valuable bargaining information in here about faculty ownership or not of your works.

So, the first chart are those schools that take as their initial position, faculty ownership. And the second chart, which I will just leave up, is those universities that take as their default position, university ownership. Now, what difference does it actually make? You can study that while I make a few comments.

In general, about two-thirds of the universities start out with the position that faculty own the works that they create unless, and then the following defaults shifting conditions are pretty typical. Not every university has all of them, but most of them show up in one form or another.

First of all, if the university has invested substantial resources in the creation of the work over and above resources commonly made available to faculty, then the universities will assert ownership in that work. Many universities have a category of institutional works, which may border on administrative, or often refer to courses that are uniform throughout the university, such as the Columbia Contemporary Civilization Course, which has been taught and added onto by generations and generations of faculty, and is considered really more of a university work product, than that of any individual faculty member, or faculty members. Those are also the objects of university assertion of copyright.

Many universities provide that where the research was sponsored by an outside entity, if a condition of the outside entity is that the university own the copyright, then the university will own the copyright.

Perhaps in more troublesome fashion, a number of schools consider that if the work qualifies as "technology" or software, then the university will assert copyright ownership in it. I think say that that is troublesome, because most of these categories are not well defined between "traditional" academic work, which belongs to professors, and "technology" which belong to the university. And I think there is some potential tension in the developing understanding of what those categories mean.

When the default position is at that university owns, there is often a provision that the university will forebear from asserting copyright in traditional faculty works. And then leaves open the question, what do we mean by a traditional sort of faculty work? The practical difference in having the default be faculty ownership or university ownership, when in doubt, if the university's position is default university ownership, then the university owns. So, if you don't know what that technology category means, it may be that the faculty members are on the short end of that stick.

Regardless of who starts out owning the copyright, most policies have some kind of constraint or limitation on the exercise of copyright, whether by the faculty member, or by the university. The most typical constrain on faculty exercise of copyright is that the faculty member will often to be asked to give the university a royalty-free license to make non-profit university educational use of the faculty's work product. Often that license applies even after the faculty member has left the university.

On the side of university ownership, if the university owns, whether by default, or because one of the conditions for transferring back to the university applies, the most typical constraints on university exercise of copyright are to allow faculty non-commercial use rights. Some universities will not commercialize the work without obtaining the consent or reasonable consent of the faculty member before commercializing the work.

And many universities provide that with respect to course materials and such, even if the copyright is owned by the university, if the faculty member leaves and goes to teach somewhere else, she can take the course materials with her to teach at the next place.

And only one university, mine, provides that even when the university owns the copyright in the work, it should respond favorable to the creator's request to the university to make the work freely available. In other words, the university in effect renounce its exercise of copyright control over the work that it owns at the behest of the creator of the work. And that extends not only to faculty creators, but also to staff creators.

This was put in the Columbia policy largely at the request of the academic computing staff, who don't necessarily hold faculty appointments, but felt very strongly that what they do should be made freely available for other people to build upon. And the university did accede to that request. I'm not saying that other universities don't do it as well, but it's not explicitly in their policy.

Let me turn now to the final topic, which is assuming that the faculty member does own the copyright, what does she have to give up in order to get published? And this chart is a cross-section of publishers, both learned societies and for-profit publishers. I found it rather interesting that there turns out not to be that much difference in the terms between learned societies and for-profit publishers.

Typically, the publishers demand a total assignment of copyright from the authors. And this is pandemic, so much so that I will read from a copyright assignment form that I actually received today. It says, "I, the undersigned, hereby irrevocably grant and assign exclusively to the National Academy of Sciences by rights, including copyright interests, in materials or work that I will contribute to the preparation of the report identified below that comes out of this symposium. And in the report, under all laws, treaties, and conventions throughout the world, in all forms, languages, and media, now or hereafter none or developed without limitation."

The consensus of this panel is we will not sign this agreement. This may also be the last talk I ever give at the National Academy of Sciences. But this is pretty typical.

Many of the agreements do, nonetheless, provide for some kind of privilege back to the authors, notably for their own non-profit university use in further works or in teaching. Where there is considerable divergence, and I'll move the slide down so you can see more of these, is with respect to electronic rights.

And there, there is quite a range of tolerance for professorial resort to electronic publication. Remember that most of these journals, I think almost all of them, publish both in print and in electronic form. Depending on the contract, the author of the article will be permitted to post an abstract of the article with a link to the publisher site, or she may be allowed to post a pre-print of the article on her own Web page, or on some on some other pre-print site, but she may not post the text as edited by the journal.

Another variation permits posting of the article, but only on restricted access sites. So, with respect to what the author can do with her own article, it is far from open access. In the interest of completeness, I will just read paragraph four of the NAS contract, which says:

"In making this assignment, I understand that it is the National Academies' policy to grant permission to me to use materials prepared for this report without fee, upon application to the National Academy Press."

So, that means that I can't use my own stuff without written permission from the National Academies. And as you can see from the chart, this is not atypical.

Now, one might think that this would create a lot of screaming unhappiness. So, why not? At least why not yet? I think that the simple and completely unlegal answer to that is that professors in practice largely ignore the contractual limitations, and they boldly post full text regardless of what their contract says.

A highly unscientific survey of my colleagues in the sciences at Columbia University suggests that what I will call the Nathan Detroit model of publication, or e-publication, so sue me, sue me, what can you do me? They are basically betting that the STM publishers will not actually enforce that contract against the authors.

Now, Ann Okerson will go into more detail about author-publisher licenses, and Michael Jensen will discuss a form of e-publishing which does not require authors to give up their copyrights in order to be distributed online. I'll simply conclude with a look to the future.

A number of the speakers on the first two panels have envisioned an evolution away from the production and distribution of copies on the part of publishers, and toward value-added services such as peer review, or what Wendy Lougee referred to as the codification of prestige, and a variety of secondary indexing and searching services. These were referred to by Michael Keller and by Joe Esposito.

Now, if it is true that the commercial value will no longer attach to the actual content of the work, which may well remain on the academic's Web site, or on a pre-print server, or on SSNR, as we will soon learn, then Joe Esposito may be correct, that copyright won't matter anymore to publishers.

I do think that copyright matters to authors. One thing I didn't mention about what difference does it make when the university default is faculty ownership or university ownership, is that I think there is a significant psychological factor in being the owner of the copyright in your work. And I think the universities that take the work made for hire position risk, to the extent that their faculty knows about it, risk antagonizing those faculty members.

I think there is something very deep seated, even if one believes warmly in open access, in still being considered to be the author and copyright owner of your work. So, whether or not it matters to publishers in our old new future, I think it will continue to matter to authors.

Thank you.

[Applause.]

Agenda Item: Licensing - Ann Okerson, Association University Librarian for Collection sand Technical Services, Yale University

MS. OKERSON: I guess as moderator it falls to me to introduce myself, which is a kind of odd thing to do. But my credentials for talking about licensing really go to the fact that I do such a whole lot of it, and that may be the best credential of all. I am overall, responsible for licensing electronic content in the Yale library system, and also for a consortium of 25 large research libraries called the Northeast Research Libraries Consortium.

And in that role, I have been privileged also to have some funding from the Council on Library and Information Resources, and the Digital Library Federation to pursue various Web sites and topics in licensing.

So, my elevator message today, if you hear nothing else, is that licenses are a not entirely new, but a newer way of conducting our business. I believe that licensing can and does work, and I'm going to talk about why. And in adoption that fairly positive posture, I know that I speak differently from many people that you have heard on this topic in the past.

There are going to be various URLs in this Power Point. You can get these from me or from the National Academies, so don't worry about writing them down.

Jane talked about copyright. And as we all know, copyright is a long established regime that we have used to govern print or artifactual information. The first US Copyright Act was passed in 1790. And currently, we are governed by the 1976, which was amended by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in October 1998. And as Jane told us, copyright describes the owner's rights. It also describes the rights of users or non-owners.

Mostly, we in this room, think of copyright as a good word, and I think we think that because copyright law is arrived at through a whole national dialogue, consensus, and it takes time for that dialogue, and for the law to happen.

Now, copyright and licenses together, both of them rest on the concept of intellectual property, but copyright is always the law of the land, and of the nation. And it tends, at least the US Copyright Act does tend to be very high in concept, and very, very low in specifics. It's also hard to change That's probably a good thing. As I said, it requires a national dialogue to enact or change copyright law. So, we have to be patient if we wish to see that legislative process go in a useful direction, as we see it.

Licenses or contracts are quite different. They grant rights to use of what you do not own. They are negotiable business-to-business agreements. They are specific. They are very tailored. And that specificity can be very reassuring. If you are an elementary school teacher, and you like to teach kids in your class, and kids across your school district, and you want to know what you can do, a license can actually help delineate that in very useful ways.

Licenses can restrict. They can clarify, or they can expand rights that would be granted copyright law, so in that sense a license is a fairly neutral document controlled by the parties to the license.

People often ask why is it that we can't just use copyright for electronic information resources for journals, databases, and so forth? Why is it that we are using licensing in this environment? I forgot to list the most obvious think, and that is that there is in the electronic environment, no artifact to work with. There is nothing to hold, and there is no object to own. And that's a very big factor in library licensing.

The electronic distribution environment is very new. As you all know, information can be distributed very widely and very easily. At a keystroke you can send an article to tens of thousands, however many people you wish in under a second.

Current copyright law doesn't fully address copyright owners' concerns. Some of those concerns go to the rapidity of distribution of copyrighted works. But that's not the only concern that the vending and publishing community has. Let me give you two examples of other concerns.

A number of vendors and aggregators have added value to public domain databases, such as PubMed and so on, and have found a customer community willing to pay for that added value. The copyright wouldn't probably protect what they have done to make a market for that public database.

Other vendors, aggregators, and publishers have digitized a lot of out-of-print copyright works, and have added a great deal of functionality and value to those. And again, because the works they have digitized are in the public domain, out of copyright, copyright law wouldn't really help them in marketing or selling that material.

Another reason that I think there is value in licensing at times is that copyright law does seem to be in a state of flux. Now, I have said it takes a long time to change the law. But it does seem that almost every session of Congress, there is copyright legislation or database legislation or something that sounds at least negative to my community.

I always breathe a sigh of relief when the session ends, and that legislation isn't enacted. But at times, I feel very much reassured by the fact that I may have a license that actually gives me a good position for my users.

Copyright law can't address the details of complicated electronic information arrangements anymore than it could in print for our subscription agency and our approval contracts. So, to those things, we turn to licenses. Licenses can clarify and disambiguate numerous matters where practices are unclear. They do encourage dialogue, and I think this is the most valuable part of the licensing process from my point of view.

Licensing engages the two parties in a conversation about what kind of expectations they have of each other. And over the last few years in the Internet information environment, this has in fact led to a great deal of convergence, I believe anyway, between librarians and publishers, not by any means perfect convergence, but a great deal.

Licenses are probably more able to cross national boundaries. Copyright law does vary between countries. Licenses are, in that way, more portable. And so, they have enabled us to move ahead in the electronic marketplace without waiting for copyright or database legislation to tell us what we should do.

So, how do licenses work? This is very, very quick. In the United States, licenses are governed by state law, not national law. And they are harmonized through a group called NCCUSL, which is the National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws. So, in this country, a contract that you sign in Connecticut or Washington, DC or whatever, is portable across lines.

Contracts can, and I would say should be crafted for the benefit of all parties. They used to be regarded as entirely controlled by publishers, at least in my community. But I have to say that those days are going away, and in some cases they are largely gone.

From the point of view of scientific authors, authors can license their works to publishers, rather than transferring copyright. We heard Jane talk about this a little bit. And I believe that such licenses do offer the authors more control, although I don't understand why so few scientific authors still choose to do this.

Libraries, working with publishers in the license environment have in fact made an electronic market possible, and as I said earlier, if we had waited, we would have still been waiting for a magic solution.

The important to know about a license is that the license you agree to is the one you must live by. This is a cartoon from The New Yorker. Moses saying to the Lord, "Next time you carve something in stone, have it spell checked first." You really do need to know what you are signing, and that means you need to read it, unless some of these egregious faculty practices that Jane referred to.

Some hot issues for libraries and consumers in the licensing arena, and then I will get to the authors after this. For libraries, not all licenses have been fair or negotiable. In fact, oh contraire. Ten or 15 years ago the licenses we encountered were absolutely horrible, and I think unacceptable.

Some problem areas have been resolved, but others persist. And the trick is, I think, are interlibrary loan and perpetual access and archiving. And I would like to spend a little time on both of those, because I do think that there are public policy issues connected with them, and the academy is interested in policy.

Interlibrary loan is a relatively long established practice whereby a user in an institution that does not hold a book or article, can request it from another library, which will supply it. Articles are generally photocopied and sent to the requester by fax or by mail, probably by fax.

Now that articles are available online, one might expect that interlibrary loan should be able to take place with the supplying library transmitting the electronic article electronically to the requesting user. In fact, very, very few publisher licenses permit this type of transmission. Most require that articles be printed from the e-version and then faxed. Or they do not permit any interlibrary loan from the electronic version at all.

Now, where interlibrary loan isn't permitted from the e-version and you have to print it, the main consequence is that delivery is more cumbersome than it could be. But where interlibrary loan isn't permitted at all, and where libraries are moving to electronic only subscriptions, which contrary to much of what was said this morning, we are, then a serious degradation of access ensues in the electronic environment.

Basically, we can't fulfill interlibrary loan requests. And the requesting reader may be unable to afford a pay-per-view solution to his or her problem at the price set by the publishers. Or more likely, the pay-per-view option just doesn't exist.

Now, my concern about archiving and perpetual access in licenses is a little different than this, but it's nonetheless as big or bigger a concern. Research libraries have indeed attempted to hang onto their print subscriptions for their archival value, and their preservation value, and to adopt electronic subscriptions to journals for reasons of service and functionality, as you heard from many today.

However, the economic climate is such that many libraries, for lack of resource to support both print and electronic formats, are beginning to drop the print. It is happening in your biggest research libraries.

Libraries have always assumed that the material we pay for will last indefinitely, and users will be able to have long-term access to it. The movement to electronic only suggests two things. One is that repositories of electronic journals had better be robust, even though currently they are less than optimal. And that licensing libraries on behalf of their users will want continued access to those e-resources even after their paid access to a given journal stops for some reason.

The reality in our contracts today is that the majority of electronic contracts do provide language for continued access, often in perpetuity, so that's a good thing. However, not all do; that's a bad thing. Furthermore, the contracts are in this regard, very weak I think, because of the inability of most publishers to follow through technologically or in a business sense on the promises that are made in the archive language of library licenses.

These major flaws in well intentioned archiving language will be resolved only upon significant discussions and investments by all the stakeholders about archiving responsibilities, costs, and technologies. And meanwhile, as we are now canceling paper subscriptions, the official scientific record is, I think, at some considerable risk.

Now, onto licenses and consumers. I think there are more public policy issues here, but they are probably not for the National Academies. For individual consumers, shrink wrap or click licenses can seriously disadvantage purchasers who probably won't take time to read of the small print. If they do, they may not understand it. And if they do, they have almost no leverage at all with the producers of this particular information. And the so-called UCITA legislation would exacerbate these problems.

Now, I think I'm not going to stop and talk about UCITA just for reasons of time, but we could get into in the question and answer if we wish.

Hot licensing issues for scientists. What we heard for quite a while is that scientists want their articles to be widely available. But there is a quandary, and that is that in order to efficiently conduct their business, publishers have asked scientists to transfer copyright, as Jane told us.

And scientists are accustomed, it's almost automated that they make such transfers and sign those papers. But these days scientists might like to distribute their own articles on their Web sites, their university sites, their lab sites, their e-print sites, as well as in the formal peer reviewed journals. And some publishers permit this, even though copyright has been transferred to them, but others don't.

So, how do we get out of this quandary? How do authors get out of this quandary? I think it is not really so difficult or impossible. And I think there are two ways of doing this. A good way is to sign a copyright transfer that permits the author to distribute his or her own work, and I will give you a very good society example of that in a minute. The advantage of this to the author is that it keeps them out of downstream copyright management over the life of copyright, and over their own life.

An even better way I would submit, is to maintain copyright, while licensing the publisher to deploy the work in ways that the publisher needs for effective publication and dissemination. And I'm going to give you two examples of license language that does that. In this case, the author will have responsibility forever for managing his or her rights, but as Jane has said, the author has wide flexibility as owner of the work. So, lets look at a few bits of sample language.

The copyright transfer that I like most of all, and I don't claim to have read them all by any means, is this one from the American Physical Society. And there is a lot of stuff here, but you can read this on their Web site. The most important points here are that the author has the non-exclusive right to give permission to third parties to re-publish the print version without obtaining permission from the APS.

The author has the right to use all or part of the article on the author's Web home page, or for lecture or classroom purposes. And the author has the right to post and update the article on e-print servers, with the author meeting certain conditions that seemed to me very reasonable. This is a good copyright transfer form.

Now, a couple of examples of author licenses to publishers, which have also worked, and some of my colleagues and I certainly use this kind of language. This is some generic language from the Liblicense Web site at Yale in which the author grants to the publisher, the right to publish the article in all editions and versions for the duration of copyright in any and all languages throughout the world. This is a license to do that.

But the publisher in turn includes a notice in the work saying copyright, name of author, readers of this article may copy it without the owner's permission if the author and publisher are acknowledged, and the copy is to be used for not-for-profit purposes. That's pretty simple and pretty good language.

One more. This is actually a license that I signed with a very large for-profit publisher about two months ago, and I thought it was quite a good license, so, this is abbreviated from their language. The author gives the publisher the right to publish the article in all media -- to authorize reproduction by others, including reprints and photocopies, to permit document delivery services, all those kinds of things that a publisher does.

And in return, the publisher recognizes retention by the author of copyright, patent, and trademark rights, and will distribute the article with the appropriate copyright notice in the name of the author. I think that's pretty good.

We heard earlier about the Creative Commons. I'll give you just about a minute on the Creative Commons, and you can explore their Web site. The Creative Commons was created to increase the amount of raw material available online -- this is from their Web site -- and to make access easier and cheaper.

When you go to their licensing section, you will see that the Creative Commons sites lets authors mix and match rights that the author will retain, and those that it will offer to readers. And I won't dwell on this, because it would take some time. The complexity is a little bit higher. I think some of the earlier statements I read you are probably more applicable to STM journal publishing, but you may see something here that is useful.

This is just a list of references to items that I have cited in this talk. The Liblicense Web site has been funded through a series of grants from the DLF and CLIR. And there is a section called, "Authors Licenses," which would be useful to people here. There is, I think, a very good Digital Library Federation (DLF) model library license, which took us two or three years to create. None of these are canonical, but they are all useful.

This is the Creative Commons Web site. Some of the chart that Jane took with the publishers and the kind of transfers they were require, some but not all, comes from a project being done in the UK called Project ROMEO, which is exploring issues around authors putting materials on their Web sites and self-archiving.

And then the work that I think is a wonderful primer to this whole area of copyright and licensing comes of the National Academy expert study in the year 2000. I saw a young man actually selling copies out here, but you don't have to buy one unless you would like to. They are very handy. This is available on the Web for free. I just happen to think it's very, very good piece of work.

And in closing, I will just give you another spontaneous cartoon from The New Yorker. The Lord and the angels looking down upon us and saying, "It has yet to turn a profit."

Thanks.

[Applause.]

I think it's polite for me to introduce Dr. Michael Jensen, even though we are being a little informal here. Dr. Jensen is the Jesse Isidor Straus Professor of Business Administration, Emeritus from the Harvard Business School. He is an authority on organizational theory, organizational strategy, and finance. He has published numerous books and articles in his areas of expertise. His PhD is from the University of Chicago. His introduction is far less than he deserves. He has several honorary degrees, a number of honors, and all other manner of good things.

He is now going to tell us about one of his creations, which is the Social Science Research Network.

Agenda Item: Economic and Non-Economic Rewards to Authors - Michael Jensen, Jesse Isidor Straus Professor of Business Administration, Emeritus, Harvard Business School

DR. JENSEN: Thank you, Ann. And your last slide was an appropriate introduction to the Social Science Research Network. But it wasn't actually founded, but is a profit-making institution. It wasn't founded to make profits, but as a way to change the way, or to make efficient the distribution of scientific work, at least in the fields that I was familiar with.

What does SSRN, or Social Science Research Network, do? We post abstracts to full text, non-refereed working papers on the Internet, on our site, as well as now full text, refereed articles and journals of established publishers who want to have access to the community that has been created around our site.

We provide both Web-based access to this work, and e-mail journals, which carry abstracts. Unlike, "The Field of Dreams," if you build it, they will not come. The announcement service is very important and highly valued. It's one of the few things we charge for, and not very much at that.

Our copyright policy is very simple. We don't take copyrights. All we take is a non-exclusive license to post the electronic versions of the abstracts or working papers on our site, and the author can take them down at any time, if they choose.

We were originally founded to publish just simply abstracts in financial economics back in 1993. We began to carry full text working papers in 1997. We outgrew financial economics very quickly, and then launched ventures in economics, for the Economics Research Network, the Accounting Research Network, Legal Scholarship Network, which is how Jane Ginsburg knew about us, and most recently the Management Research Network. And we will probably continue to expand.

Home page URLs are given here. This will all be available to you.

What do we do? We publish a little over 400 e-mail subject oriented abstracting journals to narrow down this torrent of material, this fire hose of material to something that is manageable for people, that shows up on their desk top weekly, with three to five abstracts, and links to the full text paper, full author contact information, and the ability to communicate with each other.

We do charge, as I said, for the e-mail abstracting journals, not very much; $10 a year or so will get you a subscription to one of those, and much discounted if it's part of a site license.

Another way we get revenues is that we act as a subcontractor to many universities and research institutes that contract out to us, the job of distributing their research. And currently there are 92 institutionally sponsored research paper series. We carry the full text papers. Each of those institutions has their own e-mail abstracting journal, and then along with it is the whole infrastructure that comes.

And as I said, more and more now we have established publishers that are giving us their work so that they are part of the database, part of the e-mail abstracting service, and they sell the downloads, and share the revenues. The sell the full text downloads, and share the revenues with us. Unless our partners charge for the downloads, we do not. If they charge us, then we charge.

The size of the community is about 40,000 subscribers; 31,000 authors; 1,800 partners in publishing, be they formal publishers, universities, research institutes; 716 academics worldwide who are acting as advisory board members on these journals and networks; 137 editors and network directors, most of who do this unpaid; 34 paid administrative and professional staff.

This is a brief look at what has been happening to subscribers in our system. Here is what the partners in publishing look like. These publishers on the top line are about 200 of them, with roughly close to 1,000 journals that we have permission to carry abstracts and/or full text documents.

The non-formal publishers, which would be universities, research institutes, and organizations like that number about 400, with about a similar number of journals, research papers series. Some of the partners that we have are MIT Press, Yale, UCLA, Stanford, NBER, Goldman Sachs, Blackwell. We keep growing.

This is sort of the e-library search page. Any time you dial in, you can see currently what the database looks like. There are 53,900 papers in this database, with abstracts, full text documents for about 33,000 of them, 31,445 authors.

We maintain this Web site. We get about 120,000 unique users per month, many repeat visits obviously. The average length of a session on our site is 4.5 minutes, which is huge in the Internet world. More typical, it's about a half a minute.

The Web site activity, we get about 3 million hits a month. Who knows what that means? There are 190,000 downloads of full text documents is what people are taking from our site. We have had about 4.3 million downloads to date since we started, and then about 12.6 million abstract views. Documents have grown from nothing in 1997, to about 58,000 now. Next year we are predicting probably about 2-2.5 million full text documents downloaded.

We create some measures of popularity. We don't referee anything. Our rules are that we will put it in the site if it is part of the worldwide scientific discourse in the field for which it is intended. We create for each field and each journal, these top ten lists, both for all time. And you can see there is a lot of use. John Lott(?) and Bill Landy's paper on multiple victim public shootings is at 30,257 downloads. It's an unbelievable amount of attention for papers, at least compared to what you would normally expect to get through a journal.

We also create another top ten list, because those don't change very much, for the most popular papers published in one of our abstracting journals in the last 60 days, and those change.

Every author in our system has an author page. Wherever their name shows up in our site as co-author is hotlinked. You click on that, and there is a stable URL that takes you to the full contact information for the author. This happens to be Eugene Fona(?), the University of Chicago, and provides a list of all of his papers on our site, which are clickable. They are all reachable by clicking on the title, and downloading.

And it gives a total number of downloads from all of his documents, and the articles are ranked, and the downloads for each one of them are given. Gene has had 95,000 full text downloads of his articles over the last 7 years.

So, that is what SSRN. Let me review what do we charge for. We charge these nominal amounts for the abstracting journals. We charge institutions who want to stop distributing the work themselves, and delegate that job to us. Their work then becomes part of this searchable database, and it develops a weight of its own.

We carry a professional announcement and job series, and we charge nominal amounts for people to make announcements there. And in cases where people choose to sell their work through our site, prices range anywhere from $5 per download for many full text journal articles. The NBER charges $5 a download, to $20 a download for a couple of the publishers, and they share those revenues with us. Someday I hope to be looking from that cloud and say, well, it's not only become self-financing, but it's actually covering its cost. But that will happen. I don't have much doubt of that.

So, let me close there, as just an example of what can happen in this world in that people's response to SSRN has been amazing. Authors love it. The users love it. And it grows in popularity every year, and we get requests to extend it. And as our resources allow that, we probably will.

So, thank you, Ann Okerson for inviting me, and Jane Ginsburg, and we'll turn it over to a general discussion now.

[Applause.]

Agenda Item: Panel 3 - Discussion of Issues

MS. OKERSON: It is now up to us to manage the discussion and the questions. Before we do that, I wanted to ask both Jane Ginsburg and Michael Jensen if having heard what you heard here today, including our presentations, do you have any additional comments you want to make?

PROF. GINSBURG: First of all, I'm not in the employ of SSRN, but I would like to give it a warm endorsement as a SSRN author, because in the field of legal scholarship, it has made a tremendous impact, both through those abstracting journals, which arrive regularly. You can select what fields you want to know about recent filings with SSRN, and then click on the full text. More often than not you can get the full text, and not just the abstract.

And then there is the author gratification element of SSRN, which I think is not generally available elsewhere. You saw one of those top ten lists. Well, the brilliance of SSRN is that it has devised an infinite number of carefully gauged categories so that almost every SSRN author at one point in her career is a top ten SSRN author.

And you get a nice little e-mail from Michael Jensen just to say congratulations, your article has been selected as one of the top ten in this extraordinarily narrowly defined category, but there you have it. And it's very gratifying. You go look up your author Web page, and see how many downloads on my article this week.

So, I think that's one of the reasons that you get a high level of participation once authors know about it, because it's not the kind of prestige credentialing as in peer review, but there is a kind of a validation. If your article has been downloaded 95,000 times, it's not just your sisters and your cousins and your aunts that are doing that. So, that has some value to it.

DR. JENSEN: Every once in a while, Jane, I get a request from an author to sign the top ten download notification and send it back to him or her for use with the tenure committee.

I, unfortunately, couldn't be here this morning, so I missed the earlier sessions. But my co-panelists have described a little bit of what's gone on.

I would like to say that it wasn't clear to me when we started out that we could make this work without taking anything other than a non-exclusive license, which people could revoke at any time. But in fact, it will work, and it does work.

It dawned on me about seven or eight years ago as I had acted as Ann Okerson and Jane Ginsburg had described, and blindly signed away these copyrights for my career in this business. And I woke up one day -- and to this day, this statement still is true -- I have never seen a publisher enforce a copyright in any way other than against an author.

I'll repeat that. I have never seen a publisher enforce a copyright in any way other than against an author. And that realization caused me to say -- and by the way, I founded and published for 20 years, the Journal of Financial Economics with Elsevier -- that led me to conclude, I'm not going to do that anymore.

So, ever since then I simply take the form, and substitute for the word "copyright," non-exclusive license and send it back. And nobody has ever refused. And so, I think the world is going to change. First of all, the digital media is making a difference, and attempts to kind of maintain monopolies on these things is going to be very short lived, and by that I mean probably over the next 10 years.

The kind of thing that has happened with me and my friends is going to happen more generally. In some places it's going to be slower. In some places it's going to be faster, but licenses, I think, will be the future. And I think the publishing won't go away. It will take a somewhat different form. Authors will have more rights. Publishers have to earn a fair return on their capital, or they won't stay in business. So, that won't change either.

MS. OKERSON: I agree. I think the days of exclusive distribution may be rapidly fading. I do want to commend to you the copyright transcript from APS and others like it that recognize that, and those publishers who are willing to accept non-exclusive licenses as well. That is, I think, our future.

I see some eager beavers ready to ask questions and comments, but I want to remember our Web cast viewers, and we do have a question. It's a good one, and it may in fact require a couple of you who are standing at the microphone to answer it, because it is aimed at publishers.

With reference to Ms. Ginsburg's comments, this is addressed to STM publishers, and I see the two of you, plus others. If the funding or employing institutions were to insist on retaining copyright of work submitted to STM journals, how would this impact STM publishers' decisions about acceptance, and also the overall economics of their publishing business?

And then this person has gone on to say, I understand that the Mayo Clinic has in the past, insisted on retaining rights after first publication, and that this has had little impact on acceptance of papers originating from Mayo.

So, I would love to hear a few of you editors-in-chief or publishers on this question. It is aimed at you, not at us.

DR. BLUME: Marty Blume, editor-in-chief of the American Physical Society. I'll take that one first if I can continue afterward.

The liberality of our own copyright form, which you alluded to, gives these rights to institutions and to authors. And there is a reason for our insisting on taking copyright, as opposed to leaving it with the authors. I mentioned earlier that we had put all of our content back to 1893 online.

And if we had been taking during a number of those years, a license, and if that license had failed, as it most likely would have, have failed to mentioned electronic public means of distribution and publication, we would have had to think quite a long time before going ahead, we because we would have had to go and collect these rights, at least if we were to believe our lawyers.

And we don't know how this will work in the future. We do not know, for example, whether a license that gives us rights to methods of distribution as yet uninvented. We have legal advice that in a number of countries, and we are a very international journal, this may not be a conscionable contract.

And so, we would not be able to have the best assurance that we would be able to continue to assemble and to distribute an archive in the future. And this is the reason we ask for copyright. But we do give back to authors all the rights that they would have as if they had copyright, except the right to keep us from doing what we want to with the publication. And that's the reason we ask for it.

We have not accepted, and in the end with an explanation like this, we have not accepted a request that we accept a license, and generally authors have understood and complied.

PROF. GINSBURG: Before you go on to the next topic, unsolicited legal advice. If the license says that it extends to new modes of communication, now known or later developed, even though it's a license and not an assignment, that's valid. And even if you have an assignment, the author can terminate it under certain circumstances.

I'm not going to get into the details of termination, but for those of you who have any grant, exclusive or not, executed as of 1978, can be terminated 35 years after the grant. So, even with an assignment, you do not have water tight protection, particularly for old material.

DR. BLUME: We are prepared to wait.

But I would also like to make a comment. I.I. Rabi, a distinguished professor of physics at Columbia, the last I.I. Raabe, Nobel laureate, and one-time president of the American Physical Society told an anecdote of taking Dwight Eisenhower around the university when Eisenhower became the president back in the forties.

Eisenhower began a statement by saying what a pleasure it was to be able to meet with the employees of Columbia University. And the professor drew himself up and said, we're not employees of Columbia University. We are Columbia University. And accordingly, perhaps the professors at Columbia could keep copyright under this, since they are university.

I have a note to myself here, and this is not personally directed, that another reason for our wanting to hold copyright and have the maximum protection that we could get is that we don't trust the law, and we don't trust lawyers, not because lawyers are dishonest, or that the law is corrupt, but because we don't know how it's going to come out.

And the Tasini case is a perfect instance of this, where an unexpected result came about. And in fact, it's one that was detrimental to archiving everything that is put up.

Two other comments. SSRN looks very much to me like the e-print server that we use in physics, and also a service that was provided by the Department of Energy PubScience until it was forced to be taken down, although I understand it may have rebirth shortly, because it collected the same sort of information and made it available.

The physical society itself mirrors the e-print archive that used to be at Los Alamos, and is now at Cornell. And we make extensive use of it too, because authors can submit to that, and the subsequently submit to our home journals. So, we use it in that way.

And finally, I don't want to bite the hand that was saying nice things, but did you get permission from The New Yorker to put those things up? It did not state the copyright of The New Yorker.

MS. OKERSON: I'll spare the lecture on fair and spontaneous use, but I will say that I think when it comes to putting The New Yorker cartoons on the NAS Web site, we couldn't do that without permission.

DR. BLUME: One final comment. The APS has never taken an author to court to enforce a copyright, but we have other publishers. And that really is what it is directed at. We give all of the rights to the authors, but other publishers that are assembling collections of articles are going to make money out of it, and we would like a piece of the action, is what it amounts to.

MS. OKERSON: But before you sit down, you do have to pay the piper, and the Web cast piper has asked how you deal with works that are owned by universities or government employers.

DR. BLUME: Government employers are straightforward. Those are put in the public domain, and we accept that. And in fact, we could deal very much more readily with works put in the public domain than with copyright being held by someone. It would be easier for us, because we then have a greater assurance that we would be able to do what we wish with the article in the future.

DR. COZZARELLI: Nick Cozzarelli, editor of PNAS. Just to answer, our policy is the same as APS. And I have a comment and a question of Jane Ginsburg.

The comment is as an author, I hate those requests for reproducing my work. It's a tremendous nuisance. And I'm delighted when a journal will do it for me, and I'm even more delighted in the future when nobody has to ask.

But nobody has brought up the fact that by the author maintaining sole rights, is that it's a pain in the neck when you are writing an article, and you are trying to reproduce something, is to get permission from that author for some reproduction of it.

Now, my question to Jane Ginsburg actually relates to something that happened. Someone published an article in the Physical Review Letter, and in PNAS, four of the figures were scientifically identical. So, Marty Blume and I wrote him a letter and said, you've got to 'fess up. You did wrong. You violated our policy in two ways. You violated our copyright, and you double published.

The author came back and said, I doubled published, you got me there. But I didn't violate copyright, because although scientifically the content of the figures was identical, the appearance was not. They differed in font, color. He may have redrawn them.

Now, Marty Blume and I don't give a darn about copyright, we are typical scientists. So, we just focused in on the double publishing aspect, and still made the author publish a correction in both journals.

So, my question to you, Jane Ginsburg, in issues like this where the scientific content is the same, but the appearance is entirely different, is this author correct, that in fact he didn't violate copyright?

PROF. GINSBURG: It's hard to answer without knowing the facts. But if the content was simply information or results, that's not covered by copyright. So, the person may have been unethical, but that doesn't that it was a violation of copyright. The information itself is not protected. The way you present the information is protected, but if he changed the presentation, then he did not infringe himself, or infringe the copyright that he granted to somebody else.

On the author retains sole right. Well, just because the author retains the copyright, that doesn't mean that the author can't allow the journal to grant third party requests. Maybe it's a pain for the author to have to deal with those requests, but it might be nice for the author to know that those requests came in.

DR. GARDENIER: John Gardenier, retired statistician, and someone who has been very interested in intellectual property issues since 1996. I have a comment directed at Ann Okerson and Michael Jensen, and then leading into a question to Jane Ginsburg.

Ann Okerson mentioned being somewhat relieved each year when certain bills before Congress essentially disappeared, nothing every happened. I want to say that's no accident. And a great debt of gratitude is owed by everybody in the scientific, educational, and research communities to certain leaders, particularly the leading organizations in each of those fields.

And with regard to the scientific community, I don't think it has been acknowledged enough, but the good fight against these laws was led by William Wulf, president of the National Academy of Engineering, and most of the leg work on it was done by an individual who is here, and very much involved in this conference, and that is Paul Uhlir.

But having said that, I want to repeat something I said this morning, and that is none of this would have come to pass if we had not had very powerful allies in the commercial sector, because they are the ones that are able to actually influence the legislation.

With regard to Michael Jensen, as much as many of us admire SSRN, I would submit that under the European database directive, and under provisions of laws that were introduced, and fortunately not passed in the last few years, SSRN-like sites would not be protected under copyright law, because what was proposed was purported not to have anything to do with copyright law.

It was a database protection scheme, but the language of it made any collection of materials, including a journal, an anthology of poems or whatever, as well as software or anything else a database. And that database would have had protections that would have trumped copyright. And thus, SSRN could have quickly become illegal, or could have been threatened by people who could bring value to it.

Jane Ginsburg is shaking her head, and for the very good reason that the people who drafted the legislation said, no, they never intended that, and it would never happen, it would never be enforced that way, because that's not the way we intend it to happen. Many people say, well, maybe that wasn't the intent, but the legal opening is there for it.

And the basic of it that we have been concerned with, with these various pieces of legislation is the idea that they would appear to protect both facts and ideas, as well as copyright expression.

Now, Jane Ginsburg, in her talk mentioned reassuring decisions from the 7th District Court. In September 2002, as you will see in your literature here, there was a symposium here on the role of the scientific and technical data and information in the public domain. By the way, the National Academies Press is publishing the proceedings of that. In the July edition of Scientific and Engineering Ethics, my personal summary of that same conference will appear.

But at that point, I believe it was Jerry Reichman who stated that unlike the 7th District, the 2nd and 9th District Courts have made decisions that appear to violate the Feist decision, and appear to open the way to applying copyright law to facts and ideas. I'm wondering if Jane is familiar with that sort of thing, and whether you agree with Jerry Reichman that there is some danger for the alternative interpretation of law by different districts?

PROF. GINSBURG: I don't agree, but it might be a bit complicated to explain why I don't agree. Let's look at the example of SSRN. I don't see how SSRN is violating anybody's copyright or database rights, to refer to the regime that exists in the European Union.

If SSRN is posting abstracts or full text that the author either still has the copyright, or has permission to give to SSRN, there is obviously no copyright violation there. I guess I just don't see where a database issue gets into it.

With respect to the decisions in the 2nd and 9th Circuits, those did not concern the protection of information as such. The 9th Circuit addressed a manner of classifying information, and concluded that there is authorship in the intellectual effort that goes into classifying information. So, not the information itself, but the way it is organized.

And similarly, the 2nd Circuit distinguished information as such with what it referred to as opinion or value-laded information. The case at issue happened to be a compilation of projected values of used cars. And there the 2nd Circuit said this isn't fact. This is somebody's evaluation. And that is not the same thing.

So, a collection of evaluations is a protectable work. That doesn't mean that a single evaluation is protected under the copyright law, but the work as a whole was protected, because it was subjective. What the Supreme Court said that objective facts like the telephone book are not protected. And I don't think there is any erosion of that.

DR. GARDENIER: With regard to whether there is a danger to SSRN, I totally agree. On the copyright law there isn't. If there is any deference whatsoever in any database legislation to copyright law, I would say that takes away most of the threat. The problem has been that there hasn't been any deference in the laws that have been proposed.

Anyone who claims ownership of a collection of data, and can indicate that they put some substantial effort into putting the data together, can be defined under proposed legislation as a database owner.

To the extent that they can claim that they put some compilation of information together which is similar to or duplicated by a service such as SSRN, they can exert database ownership rights over that, and require at least civil recompense, and under some parts of some proposed statutes, even criminal prosecution.

And the interpretation that a number of people have made of this, who are very frightened of this whole thing, including virtually every speaker at the September conference here at the National Academies, is not that we think that everybody is going to run out and do this. But we think that the fact that the threat would exist under law, would provide a very chilling effect on a lot of scientific research, and other scholarly work.

PROF. GINSBURG: Actually, I don't think SSRN is doing anything that would make it liable under database protection such it exists in the European Union. It might be the beneficiary of database protection. That is, that SSRN collects abstracts, categorizes those abstracts. To the extent that the categorization is an original work of authorship, SSRN as a whole, might be protected by copyright.

But under the European database provisions, if somebody were to lift large chunks out of SSRN, and start its own collection of abstracts, SSRN might have a claim if it were European, because the European rights don't protect Americans. It might have a claim that it might not have in the United States. But there, I don't see SSRN as a victim, I see SSRN as a potential beneficiary. I don't think I want to go further into that.

MS. OKERSON: Dan Atkins has been waiting patiently. Please, go ahead.

DR. ATKINS: Tomorrow, a lot of the panels are focusing on kind of the future of the process of publishing, and the products of publishing. But as far as I know, we have no particular legal scholars or licensing practitioners involved in that.

So, I wanted to ask, as we see in the future where the nature of the document could be expanded to be a multimedia thing, a thing involving computational objects, access to the data sets, video, audio, maybe produced as a composite object by multiple authors in multiple institutions, and so forth, I guess to start out with Jane, what kind of complications does that present to the present kind of models of copyright and intellectual property?

And kind of a corollary question if you choose to get into it is whether you see the kind of digital rights movement coming out of the Hollywood arena, and ultimately maybe some of the objects coming out of Hollywood and coming out of the STM world may actually overlap more than we imagined, what does that have to say, or how does that likely play into this future?

PROF. GINSBURG: Let me see if I understand the question. The first hypothetical is that you get a lot of people collaborating on a work which contains text, images, a variety of things?

DR. ATKINS: Audio, computational programs, access to the underlying data sets that would all the "reading" that multimedia document to actually reproduce simulations. So, there is a whole host of things that are partly ideas, partly expressions, partly in a sense performances. I am not actually quite expert enough to ask a question sharply.

But in that kind of world, do you see additional complications around copyright and intellectual property that need to be anticipated?

PROF. GINSBURG: Not necessarily. The work that you describe, multimedia work, would probably be considered an audiovisual work in the categories of the statute. And the owners are the creators, all of them, if it's not a work made for hire. This is a situation in which it might be good to have contracts between all the owners before they go ahead and do this, because the administration of the work might be a little complicated.

The default position in the copyright law is that all joint authors share equally in the value of the work. Any joint author or co-owner of the work can separately grant non-exclusive rights in the world, unless the contract provides otherwise, although they have to get together and agree on the grant of exclusive rights.

So, then it's a question of getting your contracts in order. But as a matter of copyright law, it doesn't pose any really greater degree of complexity than making a movie or any audiovisual work with a lot of participants involved. So, that's largely a question of contracts.

And I'm not sure I remember the second hypothetical.

DR. ATKINS: Well, it was about the digital rights movement coming out of Hollywood, and the modifications of technology which could enforce those, or making it illegal to break in coding schemes that protect intellectual property rights, and so forth. Do you see any of that having applicability to the STM realm, creating either additional opportunity or problems?

PROF. GINSBURG: Sure. Some of the prospects that were discussed earlier today such as pay-per-view for scientific, technical, and medical journals, or download it, and you can have it for a week, and then it disappears. All of those work through access controls, technological measures that control access to and possibly additional ones that control the copying of the work. But let's just deal with the access control.

So, your subscription deal is that you have a keep it for a week deal. What the law says you can't do is break the access code so that although you pay for keep it for a week, you now get to keep it forever. The business models that are developed out of these variations on how much of the work you get to see, how often how many times, for how long and so forth, all of those are built on access controls.

The premise is that we can give people more varieties of access at different price points. Now, this probably doesn't translate to STM as well as it does to say the record business, where maybe you don't want to buy the CD with 12 songs you can't stand for the one song you do want. There you can see that the model of have one song, just one song with two plays or something like that could be quite attractive.

I don't know if one read of a medical article has quite the same -- but, this is something that Michael Jensen and I talked about during the break. There is, I think, the difference between the music business and the journal business is it has taken the record companies a very long time to acknowledge that people don't want to be tied to the entire CD anymore. They would like to have just one song or two songs, regardless of whether they have it permanently or for some limited time.

But at least the package that the record companies impose since the death of singles on the music buying public is now no longer enforceable thanks to a variety of lawless things like Napster and Kaza(?) and so forth.

Well, I think similarly one might say with respect to journal publishing, that not everybody wants the entire journal issue. They may want one article out of the journal. But why do you have to buy the entire journal, if all you want is one article? So, the breaking up of journal issues has already been practiced with respect to photocopy rights. The Copyright Clearance Center has for years, granted licenses for photocopying single journal articles. And that translates perfectly well to the digital rights as well.

And just one last thing I will say is an example of a publisher who enforced copyright, not against an author, but against a user. The American Geophysical Society sued Texaco because it was making systematically large number of photocopies of works from that and 500 other journals without paying for a license to do that. They bought one subscription, and then circulated the subscription to all of their in-house scientists, who made and kept photocopies.

And the American Geophysical Society and a bunch of other publishers sued Texaco saying take the CCC license instead, and they prevailed. So, that's where copyright was enforced against a commercial user.

DR. ATKINS: Thank you.

MR. Gardenier: Turkan Gardenier from Pragmatica Corporation. I had a question for Prof. Ginsburg. I was quite surprised to hear the word work for hire mentioned under a university appointment nearly because of the fact that the professor is given the appointment based upon a specialization or a PhD dissertation that was prepared prior to the appointment.

And he or she is asked to prepare curricula, course syllabi based upon the expertise that he or she brings to the university. So, I was quite surprised. The only time that I had seen work for hire was under for example a contract where specifications were written, and a consultant or somebody is hired to perform the task based upon specifications. And sure enough, the product is given in lieu of some hours of work to perform the task.

And then those rights are then transferred to the primary contractor, and then maybe back to the government. So, would you clarify the logic behind it?

PROF. GINSBURG: Work for hire is a term of art. It's a legal term. And what it means, and it's defined in the statute as a work prepared by an employee in the course of employment. And faculty are employees. We may be the university in a beautifully spiritual, metaphoric sense, but we are still the employees of the university. So, if one takes the statute literally, there is a little problem.

Now, Judge Posner, ever clever, cited another portion of the statute, the ownership provisions, in which a work for hire is referred to a work prepared for the employer. Now, there Judge Posner said well, academics are kind of free, itinerant spirits, and they don't really creator the work for the university. They create it for science, or for knowledge.

And he didn't go quite to these poetic extremes, but if on imagines Abelard winding his way from university to university in the Middle Ages, he wasn't creating any of his theological commentaries for the University of Paris or the University of Bologna. He was creating it perhaps for a higher cause, but in his mind, apparently an attitude that your shock and revulsion to the concept of work for hire suggests, and not really creating it in that somewhat more proletarian way for the university.

So, that was another reason that Judge Posner tried to find some language in the statute that would get out of the apparent bind found for saying that what faculty create are not works for hire. Unlike administrators, those lowly beings create works for the university when they create, to cite one case, an alumni fund-raising document prepared by an administrator was considered to be a work for hire, as opposed to the those more uplifting works written by faculty members.

DR. CHAN: My name is Leslie Chan. I'm here representing a project called Bioline International. And in many regards we are the small deal if you will, compared to the big deal. And by that we mean that our publishers are all typically very small, non-profit scholarly publishers from the developing countries. And the major, major obstacle we have is making these materials visible. And through electronic means we are able to do that.

But then our second obstacle has been in terms of getting into the libraries. And we were advised a couple of years ago to take the licensing route, that is to negotiate with libraries. And we quickly discovered that you have a slide earlier alluding to the fact that big libraries have the advantage, because they have the staff to negotiate a license.

But we also find the flip side is true. That these processes are also set up in favor of the big publishers, because they do have sales people. They have lawyers. They have people who do nothing but licensing and negotiation. We have a full-time staff of one and a half. So, we just don't have the know-how or the time to negotiate with libraries, or work out a system whereby we could get our material into the right places.

So, I would like to hear a couple of things. One, in terms of advice with the library community, how best to work with the library community. And the second point I want to allude to is that in the last year or so we discovered that in fact for small publishers of the size we are talking about, several hundred members, but very limited distribution, open access in fact is the only way to go.

By that we have to remind ourselves that the mission of the publisher is not really to make a profit, but it's to fulfill the mission of the organization to get the information and research out. And there have to be other ways to recover the costs from others means of the society, from other activities, rather than get stuck in the subscription models as a way to pay for the subscription.

The other lesson we learned is that by controlling access, we spend more money than we are able to recoup from the subscription itself. The control of access, and I would like to know from the other big publishers when they talk about the costs of IT, how much money they spend on controlling access. I bet you that's a lot in their budget.

So, I'm not sure what my question is. I'm sorry.

MS. OKERSON: Well, I'm interested to see you here, and to hear that Bioline is alive and well, because my recollection, poor though it is, is that a couple of years ago one of your colleagues from the University of Toronto, Warren Holder I think, did a brief presentation at consortium directors meeting.

And we all left fueled with good spirit, support for this project. We wrote. We got copies of some sort of contract. And when we were ready to consummate whatever arrangement it was, we were told that Bioline didn't have the rights to deal with us, and that was two years ago, and we haven't heard of you since.

So, it's kind of hard for willing libraries to manifest an esprit de corps and go ahead with something when there is no marketing at all, and negative marketing in fact. I think that's what happened.

DR. CHAN: The timing of that was interesting, because actually that was the time when the Tussimi(?) hit the court, or at least the preliminary hearing of it. And our university administrator was actually quite concerned that what if we start licensing these material, even though they are from authors in developing countries, and the chances of them suing is so dismal, that they cannot take the chance of that particular risk of using the university as part of the umbrella group to license that.

So, since then we have worked out a different model of responsibility that relieved the university administrator of some of these concerns. So, we are ready to market again.

MS. OKERSON: I think for those of you who don't know, and I'm not sure I'm remembering well, but Bioline is an aggregation. I don't know how many STM titles from countries in Latin America, Africa.

DR. CHAN: We have 24 journals right now, some from Latin America, some from India, and some from Africa, and a couple from Southeast Asia. And the number are growing, but the area that is growing the fastest are in fact the open access journals, because the publishers, as we are documenting in the last year and half, is that the benefit of having the readership expanded results in actually a lot more than just readership.

It results in submissions from authors outside of their native countries, because the authors know that when they publish in these journals, which peer reviewed, they will be read by their colleagues just as the same. It's an aggregated database. It's going to be OEI compliant and so forth. So, in terms of visibility, it's already showing its impact for some of these open access journals.

So, we have to measure the return in terms of the readership and the impact, rather than the revenue that it can generate. So, we hope to go back to the funding agency to fund these journals, which are funded by many different organizations, depending on the journals, to convince them that they are spending the money in a good way. We don't want them to expect the money to be returned from subscription. So, I think we need to work with the funding agencies in that regard too.

DR. RAPOPORT: Alan Rapoport for the National Science Foundation. No one ever answered the Web question about universities owning the copyrights actually.

MS. OKERSON: I think Marty Blume actually did answer it. He said it works for me.

DR. RAPOPORT: I have an extension of that, which is more a legal question. I think one of you intimated that most faculty don't even know who owns the copyright in the university. So, if faculty are signing off -- I can see the situation evolving that faculty are signing the copyright off the publishers when they don't own the copyright.

Does that happen often? What's the legality? We said that most publishers don't enforce it, but is there a lot of signing over of copyrights that aren't even owned by the people who are signing them off? You intimated that that might be happening.

PROF. GINSBURG: If in fact these writing have been works made for hire, then the authors may in fact be selling the Brooklyn Bridge when they sign those publishing contracts. Now, one way out of that bind is that a number of universities, you may recall from the charts, have their copyright policies in writing, and require some either signing of a special agreement, or say that the employment agreement incorporates the copyright policy by reference.

What that would do would be if it's a university that says we do not assert, or we grant back the copyright in traditional academic scholarship to the professors, that would in effect, transfer the copyright to the professors, and then the professors would have something to give to the publishers.

But it is true that the ambiguity about the actual status of faculty writing potentially infects a lot of publishing contracts as well. I'm sure you're happy to hear that.

DR. BLUME: I found a copy of our copyright form, and at the bottom it says if the article has been prepared as a work made for hire, the transfer should be signed by both the employee above and the employer below. This was a revision of July 2002, and it was just for this reasons, that our attorneys -- you notice I say our attorney, your lawyer -- recommended to us.

So, we tried to cover that. Of course, if the author doesn't know that it was a work for hire, there is not much that either of us can do about it, and we'll just take our chances with it.

I did want to respond to the previous discussion. That's really why I got up. The assistance not only to readers of our publications in Third World countries, where we are like many of the other societies, providing free access to them, but also to publications there is something that we would like to see.

I agree that for them, open access is the best thing that they can do. And if the journals are small enough, an economic point is that there is an apparent diseconomy of scale between a very small journal and very large ones, because when you get to very large ones, you have all of the apparatus of employment, medical benefits, a human resources group, et cetera. And the smaller organizations don't have that.

One of the discussions that we have had with a number of journals in Third World countries is the possibility of them reprinting articles from our journals that were sent in by authors from their country that are published, so that they have something that can give greater publicity to those authors, and also greater publicity to their journals. So, this is something that we would like to see done.

There are not that many articles that come from the smallest of the articles, but it would be worthwhile for us in helping them get a leg up with their publications.

MR. BARNAS: Ed Barnas, Cambridge University Press. We are currently requiring copyright transfer form with rights reserved back to the author. But we are discussing whether or not to shift to have an author retain copyright, with the grant of rights to the publisher.

But many of the things we are discussing are the implications of all the gory details. Obviously, you mentioned earlier is the administration of rights requests, which many authors don't want to handle, and it's easier to go through the publisher. It makes it easier for authors to find cited material.

But one which we are trying to struggle with is the identification of copyright on the individual article since it has been disintermediated between the journal issue and the article, to try to preserve the fact that there is the copyright of compilation in the journal issue itself. But we may revert having an author or government have ownership of the article itself, and how to deal with that formulary.

But another question which arises simply is that of all of us here, not all the papers that we publish are from authors who reside in the United States. And our distribution is international. And there are the governing Bern and UCC and other copyright conventions that govern copyright in the world.

But we all depend on individual national governments to implement it without our own localities. You had mentioned that the right of attribution, which is contained I believe in Bern, is not implemented US law. I have a situation. I work for a publisher that has offices here in the States, and publishes journals in the States, as well as in the UK. And we are trying to figure out the proper way of formulating our copyright agreements of works in both jurisdictions.

And that's one of the other concerns about this grant of license. What are the troubles down the road that we may not see? It's just difficult issue all around, because I can think of cases in the past, the classic case of Hitchcock's "Rear Window," which held from release because the original rights of that play did not extend to video presentation.

PROF. GINSBURG: Well, "Rear Window" was a termination case. It wasn't a question of whether the license extended to new media. It was that the contract was terminated altogether. So, that was actually in a sense easier.

The contracts that grant rights in multiple territories. The usual approach is that the party selected to govern the contracts over Cambridge University Press, probably most law will define the respective rights of the parties, unless there is some local public policy that cuts against that. So, actually, it's not necessarily extremely complicated when you have a multiple territorial grant of rights.

But keep that attribution right in. It's required by English law. And if we get the benefit of it, so much the better.

MS. OKERSON: One more comment I think before we finish.

DR. NEAVILL: Gordon Neavill, Wayne State University. I wanted to raise a couple of more points in connection with the idea of academic work being done for hire, and some problems that I see with that.

Number one, most academics are nine month contracts. How do you determine whether the work was done under the contract, or during the summer? Two, many academics move from one institution to another, and in that case, which institution owns the copyright? I'm teaching courses at Wayne State that I created at the University of Alabama. And it would be hard for me to see how Wayne State could claim copyright in lectures that originated elsewhere.

And thirdly, does the concept of academic freedom -- that suggests that the academic originates the concepts, develops it the way they wish, and that the work is not done at the behest of the university. All the university really requires is that you do something, and can you copyright something?

PROF. GINSBURG: These are all very good reasons why academic work products should not be considered work made for hire. And as I said, it hasn't been squarely posed, so there is not actually a decision about whether Congress perhaps unwittingly changed the law.

The University of Michigan changed the law. The University of Michigan used to take the position that everything was work for hire, and has more recently gone to a different approach.

MS. OKERSON: Well, you have all been tireless, valiant. I wonder if our chairman, Ted Shortliffe would like to dismiss us and tell us what we are doing next?

Thank you.

DR. SHORTLIFFE: I hope you will all be able to return, and some of the people who have now drifted off will be back tomorrow to participate in that.

[Whereupon, the meeting was recessed at 5:44 pm, to reconvene the following day, Tuesday, May 20, 2003, at 8:30 am.]