All across the nation, universities are being called into critical conversations about social justice. The ALA Code of Ethics calls on librarians to “uphold the principles of intellectual freedom” and “distinguish between our personal convictions and professional duties.” Our ethics shape our engagement in these critical conversations. In my presentation, I will address the ethical dilemmas raised in open access electronic resources from predatory journals, to article processing charges (APCs), to xenophobic collections. We will discuss how our professional ethics are applicable to and stretched by the goals of open access. Real examples of ethical dilemmas will be shared for open discussion.
Ethical Dilemmas in Collection Development of Open Access Electronic Resources
1. Ethical Dilemmas in
Collection Development of
Open Access Electronic
Resources
Amanda Echterling, VCU
NASIG 2018
Atlanta, GA
2. Background - Professional Ethics
The foundation of professional ethics rests on
values of conduct that govern the decision-making
practice of an individual or group who are in the
same profession. The primary purpose of the codes
is to give the members a set of agreed upon rules
to guide not only their professional behavior but
also their business decision process.
If professional ethics are not recognized or
followed by the members of the occupation, then
both the ethical standards and the occupation
could be at risk of failing and of breaking the
public trust. (Guide to Ethics in Acquisitions, page
12)
Professional Ethics are in relationship with but not
identical to individual, social and legal ethics.
3. ALA Code of Ethics
The principles of this Code are expressed in broad statements to guide ethical decision making. These statements provide a framework; they
cannot and do not dictate conduct to cover particular situations.
1. We provide the highest level of service to all library users through appropriate and usefully organized resources; equitable service
policies; equitable access; and accurate, unbiased, and courteous responses to all requests.
2. We uphold the principles of intellectual freedom and resist all efforts to censor library resources.
3. We protect each library user's right to privacy and confidentiality with respect to information sought or received and resources
consulted, borrowed, acquired or transmitted.
4. We respect intellectual property rights and advocate balance between the interests of information users and rights holders.
5. We treat co-workers and other colleagues with respect, fairness, and good faith, and advocate conditions of employment that
safeguard the rights and welfare of all employees of our institutions.
6. We do not advance private interests at the expense of library users, colleagues, or our employing institutions.
7. We distinguish between our personal convictions and professional duties and do not allow our personal beliefs to interfere with fair
representation of the aims of our institutions or the provision of access to their information resources.
8. We strive for excellence in the profession by maintaining and enhancing our own knowledge and skills, by encouraging the
professional development of co-workers, and by fostering the aspirations of potential members of the profession.
4. ALA-ALCTS Statement on Principles and Standards of Acquisitions Practice
In all acquisitions transactions, a librarian:
1. gives first consideration to the objectives and policies of his or her institution;
2. strives to obtain the maximum ultimate value of each dollar of expenditure;
3. grants all competing vendors equal consideration insofar as the established policies of his or her library permit, and regards each
transaction on its own merits;
4. subscribes to and works for honesty, truth, and fairness in buying and selling, and denounces all forms and manifestations of bribery;
5. declines personal gifts and gratuities;
6. uses only by consent original ideas and designs devised by one vendor for competitive purchasing purposes;
7. accords a prompt and courteous reception insofar as conditions permit to all who call on legitimate business missions;
8. fosters and promotes fair, ethical, and legal trade practices;
9. avoids sharp practice;
10. strives consistently for knowledge of the publishing and bookselling industry;
11. strives to establish practical and efficient methods for the conduct of his/her office;
12. counsels and assists fellow acquisitions librarians in the performance of their duties, whenever occasion permits.
5. Background on OA Collection Development
Initiatives
● Institutional Repository
○ Researcher Preprints
○ Datasets
○ Open Educational Resources
○ Journal Hosting Services
● Open Access Publishing Fund
○ Individual Author Subvention
Publications
● Published OA Books, Journals, Databases
and other digital-born content available for
selection into local catalog and discovery
systems.
○ DOAJ and OAPEN
○ KnowledgeUnlatched, CERN SCOAP3
Blend
● Seed money for a commercial OA
venture
○ REVEALdigital
6. The Rise of OA Collection Development Policies
University of Toronto (2014) did an early study of academic libraries collections
librarians and found mixed results an no best practices.
● Format
● Business Model
DYAS-CORREIA, Sharon and DEVAKOS, Rea (2014) Open Access and Collection Development Policies: Two Solitudes?. Paper presented at: IFLA WLIC
2014 - Lyon - Libraries, Citizens, Societies: Confluence for Knowledge in Session 108 - Acquisitions & Collection Development. In: IFLA WLIC 2014,
16-22 August 2014, Lyon, France. http://library.ifla.org/id/eprint/839
7. OA Author APC Fund
Library Goal: To encourage authors to publish in OA Journals and reap institutional
cost savings while advancing public scholarship.
Publisher Reality: Managing thousands of payments a month in various formats
(check, credit card, deposit deduction) from various funding sources (individual,
funder, library) is difficult. With difficulty and an imbalance of power, comes ethical
challenges.
8. The Warning
Date: Mon, Nov 23, 2015 at 1:00 PM
“Please note that if online payment is not made within 7 days an invoice will be issued
and an administration charge will be added to your total APC. Once an invoice has
been issued the option to pay online is automatically removed and cannot be reversed.
Note, invoice (offline) payments will incur an additional charge of $75.00.”
9.
10. The Invoice Fees
● Terms of payment 20 days net
● Changes to the invoice will incur an additional charge of $55.
● If you make a bank transfer please make sure to cover your own bank costs.
● If paid by check, please add $23.
● If you wish to pay with credit card, a minimum of 3.4% will be added to the total
sum to cover the PayPal service costs.
● We reserve the right to charge 10% interest on the gross amount if this invoice is
not settled within the due date as indicated above.
11. Consumer Responsibility - Sage
“Can an institution pay the article processing charge for authors?”
It is ultimately the responsibility of author(s) to arrange payment of the APC.
However, a number of institutions and funding organizations have declared their
willingness to make additional funds available to cover the costs of open access.”
https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/faqs
12. Consumer Responsibility - Nature/Palgrave
“What time period do I have within which to make the payment?
Credit card payments are processed immediately. Usual credit terms are 30 days from
receipt of original invoice. Invoices will be chased periodically, but if after 60 days no
payment is received, the author will be contacted.
Failure to pay invoices within the stated credit term may result in restrictions placed
upon authors' ability to publish with Nature Publishing Group in the future,
involvement of a third party debt collection agency and legal proceedings. However,
NPG recognizes that often authors do not pay themselves and if an author's institution
is to pay the APC, it may take some time for an invoice to be paid.”
http://www.nature.com/openresearch/publishing-with-npg/article-processing-charges-faqs/
13. OA APCs and Professional Ethics
“We treat co-workers and other colleagues with respect, fairness, and good faith, and advocate conditions of employment that safeguard the
rights and welfare of all employees of our institutions.”
“Subscribes to and works for honesty, truth, and fairness in buying and selling,...”
“Fosters and promotes fair, ethical, and legal trade practices;”
14. OA Author APC Funds Discussion
Ethical Challenge: Using library collections budgets and library personnel to uphold
the unsavory collections practices of OA Publishers toward authors. Practices that even
skirt the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act (FDCPA)
Is this who we are?
Is being business model agnostic in compliance with our ethics?
15. VCU Collections Guidelines
“ 4. Collection Format
… Open access publications are a key focus of collecting, and critical for scholarly
communication and the future of education. Accordingly, collection librarians choose
open access publications whenever available and appropriate to support a discipline.”
https://www.library.vcu.edu/research/collections/guidelines/
16. UNT Collection Development Policy for Open
Access and Born-Digital Resources
● Quality
● Authoritativeness
● Objectivity
● Currency
● Functionality
http://www.library.unt.edu/policies/collection-development/oa-collection-
development-policy
17. Xenophobic OA - The KKK Newspapers
The initial request
● VCU Libraries Labs - Mapping the Second Ku Klux Klan, 1915 - 1940
The institutional conversation
The conundrum
18. Reveal Digital Prospectus - The KKK
Newspapers“The goal of this project is to assemble a comprehensive and hopefully complete
collection of KKK newspapers into a fully-searchable open access database.”
“The project is funded by Reveal Digital’s Diversity & Dissent Digitization Fund and
the generous support received from participating libraries.”
“This collection is scheduled to be complete and fully funded no later than January,
2020, at which time it will become open access. Prior to this date, access to the
complete collection will be limited to funding libraries.”
19. Reveal Digital Prospectus - Why The KKK
Newspapers“To understand today’s version of populism, American nationalism, and the Alt-right,
we need to go back to the 1920s when the Klan re-emerged as a slick and successful
recruiting and marketing engine that appealed to the fears and aspirations of middle-
aged, middle-income, white protestant men in the middle of America.”
“The primary mission of Reveal Digital’s open access publishing program is to
document a range of viewpoints that chronicle the historical record of 20th century
America, whether driven by racial, gender, social or political motivations.”
20. Institutional Conversation - Headlines
“VCU, UR students confront question: ‘What would a truthful representation of
Richmond’s history look like?” -VCU News April 7, 2017
“VCUarts Leads Initiative to Reimagine Richmond’s Historic Monument Avenue” -
VCUarts News June 29, 2017
“VCU asks students to stay away from Monument Avenue on Saturday” - WWBT
Broadcast Station website September 14, 2017
“VCU history education professor: How Confederate monuments and the ‘Lost Cause’
narrative distort our understanding of the Civil War” - VCU News October 3, 2017
21. Photo by Dave Parrish, Models Cheats & DJ Mentos Copyright
2017
Credit VistRichmondVA.com
22. Inherit Potential Tension
ALA Code of Ethics
Uphold the principles of intellectual freedom and resist all
efforts to censor library resources.
Distinguish between personal convictions and professional
duties and do not allow our personal beliefs to interfere with fair
representation of the aims of our institutions or the provision of
access to their information resources.
Principles of Acquisitions Practice
Gives first consideration to the objectives and policies of his or
her institution;
Subscribes to and works for honesty, truth, and fairness in
buying and selling,
24. UNT Collection Development Policy for Open
Access and Born-Digital Resources
● Quality
● Authoritativeness
● Objectivity
● Currency
● Functionality
http://www.library.unt.edu/policies/collection-development/oa-collection-
development-policy
26. Funding
“The project is funded by Reveal Digital’s Diversity & Dissent Digitization Fund ...”
“A civil society is a public space between the state, the market, and the ordinary
household, in which people can debate, engage, and act. This inaugural digitization
fund will invest in projects that embody the civil society; those non-governmental/non-
commercial organizations that helped shape and guide America through two world
wars, promoted equality across gender and race, campaigned for worker rights, and
voiced alternative social views that challenged and ultimately changed societal norms.”
27. Recommendations
Library Marketplace
● Develop comprehensive collection
development policies for OA
○ Involve the greater community
○ Question neutrality in business models
● Press commercial primary sources
publishers for OA
● Evaluate OA initiative prospectus
thoroughly
● Keep up with project and editors as it
develops
Local
● Involve greater faculty and students
● Internal reflection on why outsource this
● Press RevealDigital
○ revisions of project selection process
○ revisions of database homepage
When talking about OA Collection Development it’s important to distinguish between the kinds of requests being asked of our collection dollars and being asked of acquisitions librarians to complete.
Initiatives is something new for collections dollars, investment in prepublication at an institutional level like an institutional repository. And investment in prepublication in the individual through open access publishing fund. Now these initiatives, their scope and funding vary between organizations. At VCU our institutional repository is not a collections budget investment, but the OA Publishing Fund is. Therefore, OA Publishing fund expenditures flow threw me.
From the strange to the more familiar. OA Collection Development also involves investment in published information. Sometimes that investment does not include hard costs, like DOAJ and OAPEN are hard cost free for most, though to include them in our library collections involves overhead costs. Then there are projects that are for direct investment, Knowledge Unlatched book packages, RevealDigitial primary source historical collections, and CERN’s SOAPe high energy physics OA journals are just a few examples of investing in OA publications like any other publication.
As OA projects began to mature and increase academic librarians began to wrestle with how to select OA initiatives and OA publications to invest in.
Many respondents saw OA as a strategy within the broader scholarly communication landscape. That general endorsement with collections policies was desired, but to incorporate OA into collections policies was either too soon or overkill.
DYAS-CORREIA, Sharon and DEVAKOS, Rea (2014) Open Access and Collection Development Policies: Two Solitudes?. Paper presented at: IFLA WLIC 2014 - Lyon - Libraries, Citizens, Societies: Confluence for Knowledge in Session 108 - Acquisitions & Collection Development. In: IFLA WLIC 2014, 16-22 August 2014, Lyon, France. http://library.ifla.org/id/eprint/839
Libraries and our parent institutions have been experimenting with different business models in a variety of ways, an initial OA initiative is the APC Fund. Several have ceased, due to cost, ROI, hybrid double dipping. So, the focus has been on cost and value.
My foray into this topic began with this warning. Only 30 minutes prior, to this email from the publisher, had the author received an email confirming article acceptance. So not only is she sent this threatening language 30 minutes after point of acceptance, she has only 7 days to comply. Notice the date of the email. This is the week of Thanksgiving. 4 of these 7 days are lost to university closures.
Here is what their website actually says regarding payment.
http://www.ala.org/tools/ethics
Here is VCU’s Collections Guidelines for Open Access. It completely coincides with what Dyas-Correia and Devakos found. A general endorsement for OA. But, Dyas-Correia and Devakos also found a few great examples of OA Collections policies, including one from The University of North Texas.
Quality – the information in the resource logically pertains to the resource's apparent subject; the information is reliably accurate, demonstrably factual, and reasonably comprehensive or complete; indicators of quality can include peer reviews or librarian reviews of site and/or site content, the presence of an authoritative author or publisher, a professional look and feel, or evidence of continuing support of the resource such as archives; contact information is available for the author and publishing authority;
Authoritativeness – the credentials of the author and publisher are clearly identifiable, the legitimacy of the publishing domain of the source is apparent (e.g. .edu, .gov, .org or .net are preferred to other types of domains), and the publishing agency is recognized as reputable and likely to persist;
Objectivity – the information is provided in a circumspect manner that is open to verification and validation, with minimal advertising or other nuisances that distract the user from the primary information in the resource;
Currency – the publication date of the information is recent (within the parameters of the subject), clearly stated, and/or updated regularly as stated on the resource; and
Functionality – any citations or links are correct and functional; no (or minimal) additional software beyond a standard web browser is needed to view the resource; the resource does not require fees for access, and there is a preference that registration for access not be required; and if at all possible the resource offers options for viewing text only, for by-passing frames, or for changing the display for better viewing.
Small technical issues and In the Fall of 2018, a request was filtered to me through administration to fund the new reveal digital project.
The justification was time limited pricing and its related to a digital project we did with a Professor and could enrich the data on that project.
This is the Professor’s research area but we do not have concentrations in this area, nor a degree program in communication, nor a center of study in hate speech
Therefore, the motivations of this internal request did not align with our collections development policy and could be seen as self-serving, to expand a project of personal success.
When I refused to fund the project, the administration voted to support the purchase and we are currently at a quiet standoff. VCU Library Faculty Org has not been brought into this for shared governance. The Library advisory and Student Library Advisory groups have not been invited into this decision making process, nor has anyone or any body outside the library but the benefiting professor.
I do not have exclusive rights to expend collections funds. So, also interestingly, admin has not dictated to its staff run business office to buy it against my refusal.
Meanwhile, the parent company of RevealDigital has gone bankrupt. The fiscal position of Reveal is questionable.
So here is the basics about the project.
Here is the why.
So let's go back to that inherit tension, who is “the institution” the Library leader who requested the purchase or the academe?
When does the resources become a library resource that we must protect from censorship? Am I ethically bound to buy it even though it usurped our collection development policies and then when the students uproar ethically bound to defend it?
And this isn’t the libraries resource anyway, it will be OA in 2020, so if I do nothing the one researcher gets the product and the VCU institutional name isn’t associated with the product.
So why did I refuse? The issue I take with this Reveal Digital project has 2 prongs
The editorial messaging of Reveal Digital.
The method of distribution as Open Access.
Professional ethics says I must set aside my personal beliefs. But what if my beliefs aren’t personal but are of my academic discipline. I have a degree in communication media studies and as the homepage of my alma mater says, we will study and critique the messages of media and its context.
Quality – the information in the resource logically pertains to the resource's apparent subject; the information is reliably accurate, demonstrably factual, and reasonably comprehensive or complete; indicators of quality can include peer reviews or librarian reviews of site and/or site content, the presence of an authoritative author or publisher, a professional look and feel, or evidence of continuing support of the resource such as archives; contact information is available for the author and publishing authority;
Authoritativeness – the credentials of the author and publisher are clearly identifiable, the legitimacy of the publishing domain of the source is apparent (e.g. .edu, .gov, .org or .net are preferred to other types of domains), and the publishing agency is recognized as reputable and likely to persist;
Objectivity – the information is provided in a circumspect manner that is open to verification and validation, with minimal advertising or other nuisances that distract the user from the primary information in the resource;
Currency – the publication date of the information is recent (within the parameters of the subject), clearly stated, and/or updated regularly as stated on the resource; and
Functionality – any citations or links are correct and functional; no (or minimal) additional software beyond a standard web browser is needed to view the resource; the resource does not require fees for access, and there is a preference that registration for access not be required; and if at all possible the resource offers options for viewing text only, for by-passing frames, or for changing the display for better viewing.
But for me the biggest red flag is the database entry page
Clare Horrocks is a scholar of nineteenth century newspapers and in a 2014 article in Media History she emphasized the importance of bringing the researcher into the production of digital newspaper archives. Her best experience with a newspaper archive was an open access