Björn Brembs

In his fantastic Peters Memorial Lecture on occasion of receiving
[CNI](https://www.cni.org/)'s Paul Evan Peters award, Herbert Van de
Sompel of Los Alamos National Laboratory described my calls to drop
subscriptions as "radical" and "extremist" (starting at about minute
58):

Regardless of what Herbert called my views, this is a must-see
presentation in which Herbert essentially presents the technology and
standards behind the
[functionalities](https://bjoern.brembs.net/2015/04/what-should-a-modern-scientific-infrastructure-look-like/)
I have been asking for and have been trying to get implemented for the
last decade or so. Apparently, where we differ is only that I actually
want to use the functionalities and concepts he describes in his
presentation and, consequently, I am naive or idealistic enough to think
of ways to get there. If this makes me a radical, so be it: *radix* is
Latin for 'root' and I try to tackle the root of our problems.

Right before he talks about me, he also mentions David Lewis' [2.5%
Commitment](https://scholarworks.iupui.edu/handle/1805/14063), which I
also support. In Cameron Neylon's
[critique](https://cameronneylon.net/blog/against-the-2-5-commitment/)
of Lewis' approach one can find an important realization that bears
quoting and repeating as it is one of the main obstacles why Herbert
thinks we will never have the tools he describes in his presentation.
Cameron writes:

> That in turn is the problem in the scholarly communication space. Such
> shared identities and notions of consent do not exist. The somewhat
> unproductive argument over whether it is the libraries responsibility
> to cut subscriptions or academics responsibility to ask them to
> illustrates this. It is actually a shared responsibility, but one that
> is not supported by sense of shared identity and purpose, certainly
> not of shared governance. And notably success stories in cutting
> subscriptions all feature serious efforts to *form and strengthen*
> shared identity and purpose within an institution before taking
> action.

Cameron very astutely dissects one of the main sociological issues
holding us back: scholars do not share a common identity any more, just
as librarians and faculty do not and just as different scholarly
institutions do not share an identity with each other. So pernicious an
effect have the neoliberal mantras of "competition" and "every man for
himself" had on scholarship, that it has all but completely
disintegrated into either warring factions or competing careerists.
University rankings provide a clear metaphor for scholarly institutions
as players in a competition for whatever the neoliberal ideologues want
them to compete for: funds, human resources or prestige (aka. the
scholarly fetish
"[excellence](https://www.nature.com/articles/palcomms2016105)"). If you
talk to current university presidents, deans or provosts or read what
they have written, it seems as if most of them have completely absorbed
the neoliberal cool-aid and made themselves the defenders of
individuality, competition and external 'incentives', with the
underlying assumption that without those concepts, everybody in academia
would just sit in their comfy chairs and collect tax funds, twiddling
their thumbs. Apparently, carrots and sticks are the only way to squeeze
excellence out of otherwise lazy, selfish and parasitic scholars.
Ironically, election data suggest that a large section of these
scholarly politicians, if they are representative of their academic
peers at large, may go on to vote for left-of-center parties or
candidates who vow to combat exactly the neoliberal policies they so
ardently defend in their day jobs.

Be that as it may, apparently even for an advocate and expert like
Herbert, asking scholars to cooperate in order to achieve a greater,
public good, has now become sufficient grounds to label someone who
strives for cooperation as a "radical" or an "extremist". If indeed he
is correct and in 2018 asking scholars to behave cooperatively, rather
than competitively, is something so exotic and outrageous, scholarship
has deserved the state it currently is in.

These thoughts have reminded me of an old cartoon I've been showing in
many of my presentations. Now, I'm posting a disambiguated version of
the cartoon (sorry, I can't provide a source for the cartoon, created it
from a photograph I once was sent) that I hope explains in an
entertaining way why dropping all subscriptions and buying Herbert's
solutions from the money instead isn't extreme at all (click for larger
image):

[![](https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/busy2.png){.aligncenter
.wp-image-1678 loading="lazy" decoding="async" width="602" height="308"
srcset="https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/busy2.png 802w, https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/busy2-300x153.png 300w, https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/busy2-768x393.png 768w, https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/busy2-50x26.png 50w"
sizes="(max-width: 602px) 100vw, 602px"}](https://bjoern.brembs.net/wp/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/busy2.png)All
scholars and those working to support scholars share a common identity.
Cameron is spot on in that all too few are realizing that we all strive
for better scholarship, for more knowledge. Acquiring knowledge for its
own sake is one of the very few behaviors that humans do not share with
other animals and all scholars share a particular enthusiasm for
knowledge. In fact, the German word for scholarship is "Wissenschaft",
literally translated with "knowledge creation". In this argument, it
doesn't matter if scholar A is at institution X and librarian B is at
institution Y -- they are all scholars.

I must assume (not having been there) that this sense of communalism (to
use Merton's term) and shared identity (to use Cameron's term) must have
been much more prevalent in the early 1990s when institutions invested
in routers, cables, computers and other hardware (and time!) for
something that nobody knew what it could do: the WWW. I often wonder
what faculty would have said around 1992 (first time I had an email
address), when asked by a computing center employee: "wouldn't you like
a new service, let's call it 'email' by which your students could reach
you 24/7?". I would tend to believe that if that had been the mindset of
infrastructure experts at the time, we would not have any internet
today.

Instead, infrastructure experts at the time embraced the new technology,
were competent enough to realize which standards worked and would be
sustainable long into the future and started spending some serious money
-- regardless of whether faculty expressed any interest in using any of
this technology. In contrast, today, we stand to save money from
adopting the standards Herbert talks about and yet thinking about how to
practically achieve adoption of such common standards is grounds for
being labeled an extremist. How dare I suggest implementing modern
technology without asking faculty first! Today, we have similarly
competent experts like Herbert, but they seem to despair, expecting this
modern technology to never arrive for scholarship, instead of doing what
their predecessors have done: embrace the new technology and the
potential it brings and implement it. What a difference 25 years make:
the common good was sufficient cause for spending money in the 1990s,
when today it is seen as 'extremist' just to try and save money while
promoting the common good.

Today, librarians and other infrastructure experts dare not implement
modern technology without fear of reprisals: after all, faculty are not
colleagues any more who share a common identity, they are customers and
librarians are service providers in this corporation only called
'university' for dusty historical reasons. Clearly, single institutions
cannot act without risking league table standings or the competitiveness
of their labor force. Everyone is busy chasing prestige in an absurd
artificial competition where "excellence" is the only thing that counts,
but can't itself be counted. Some of Monty Python's most absurd sketches
appear rational in comparison.

When done competently, dropping subscriptions today doesn't risk
anybody's livelihoods or league standings any more. Thanks to a [growing
set of
tools](https://bjoern.brembs.net/2016/12/so-your-institute-went-cold-turkey-on-publisher-x-what-now/),
journals remain accessible during the transition period. The old adage
"everybody who needs access has access", once used to resist open access
campaigning, has finally become true -- without subscriptions. We just
need to take advantage of the [new
circumstances](https://bjoern.brembs.net/2017/09/with-the-access-issue-temporarily-solved-what-now/).
After the transition, nobody needs access to journals that do not exist
any more, so the enabling properties of this toolset are decisive here
and the set not comprising a solution becomes irrelevant: we have the
solutions, as Herbert so eloquently explains. What we need are enabling
technologies. We have those now, too. Most journals won't survive being
cut off from all funding.

And yet, faculty continue to chase journal spots as vehicles for their
discoveries from which they hope to harvest sufficient prestige just to
keep going. Without removing this source of prestige, faculty and
students/postdocs have little other choice than to reject the better
vehicles we now could offer. This is the main reason why 25 years of
campaigning for scholarly infrastructure reform have barely brought
scholarship to embrace the web of 1995 (in the words of Jon Tennant).
Journals, the square wheels, are the main physical obstacles to the
technology Herbert describes in his presentation. They need to go. That
is a rational solution that targets the root of the problem. If scholars
can find the Higgs Boson, I'm confident they can find other sources of
prestige once journals have ceased to exist -- should they decide that
chasing prestige is a functionality they wish to replicate.

Coincidentally, journal subscriptions also usurp most of the funds
required for implementing Herbert's solutions -- the round wheels.
Canceling subscriptions hence serves two main purposes: removing the
main obstacle for scholars using modern information technology and
freeing up funds to implement said technology: removing the square
wheels and replacing them with round wheels. Subscription journals are
the keystone in the current scholarly communication arch: remove them
and it all falls apart. Any journal-like functionality that scholars
value is easily recreated with modern technology, but with [new
functionalities](https://bjoern.brembs.net/2015/04/what-should-a-modern-scientific-infrastructure-look-like/)
and few, if any, of the current
[disadvantages](https://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fnhum.2018.00037/full)
and [unintended
consequences](https://bjoern.brembs.net/2016/01/even-without-retractions-top-journals-publish-the-least-reliable-science/).

Finally, with scholars so busy chasing excellence, chances are slim to
none they will ever ask for round wheels, as so many librarians I speak
to seem to hope for.


In his fantastic Peters Memorial Lecture on occasion of receiving CNI‘s Paul Evan Peters award, Herbert Van de Sompel of Los Alamos National Laboratory described my calls to drop subscriptions as “radical” and “extremist” (starting at about minute 58):    Regardless of what Herbert called my views, this is a must-see presentation in which Herbert essentially presents the technology and standards behind the functionalities I have been asking for

Messages de Rogue Scholar

Why academic journals need to go