13: portal: Libraries and the Academy
Interview with Dr. Charles Lowry, Editor, November 2007
Play audio (approximately 30 minutes)
This installment of Periodical Radio is about the scholarly journal portal: Libraries and the Academy. portal is written by and for college and university librarians. Its peer-reviewed articles address library administration, information technology, and information policy. Each quarterly issue contains a guest editorial, five or six research articles, and approximately five book reviews. Portal is produced both in print and online through the Project MUSE database of full-text online journals.
Johns Hopkins University Press began publication of portal in 2001, when many members of the editorial board decided to leave the Journal of Academic Librarianship to launch a new journal. I’ll let my guest tell that story. It was a successful launch. Portal was runner-up for the best new journal of 2001 award from the Council of Editors of Learned Journals, and it’s now in its seventh year of publication.
My guest is Dr. Charles Lowry, a founding executive editor, and current editor of portal. He is Dean of Libraries at the University of Maryland College Park.
Steve: Charles, thank you very much for taking time in your busy schedule for Periodical Radio. First, can you describe for our audience the scope portal’s coverage?
Dr. Lowry: Well portal was originally conceived as a journal that would deal with academic librarianship, but from a slightly different perspective than we have come to appreciate with some of the other key journals in this space, such as JAL [Journal of Academic Librarianship] or C&RL [College & Research Libraries]. That was that we wanted to try and think about the library in the larger context as an institutional element within higher education. So we wanted very much to emphasize two things. Number one, it would be an international journal, and gradually it’s come more to be that. We also wanted to have a greater participation from outside of the library per se. That is to say, we welcomed research articles and thought pieces that engaged the faculty, as well, from the user perspective for academic libraries. We’ve accomplished that in some measure. I can’t say that we have gone as far as we might have wished, but we’ve had a significant number of articles that have been reflective of the idea of bringing the user perspective, generally written by librarians and faculty members. We’ve also had members of the editorial board who are not librarians.
Steve: What topic areas are of most interest to your readers, in broad terms?
Dr. Lowry: Well that’s rather a tough one. I think what we’ve tried to do with portal was not to pigeonhole ourselves, but to deal with some of the more leading edge issues. So what we find often is that portal articles revolve around not just questions of library operations and how to manage those, but some of the leading edge areas such as assessment, policy decisions around information. I’ve heard some of my own library faculty refer to it as a journal that emphasizes things that are of direct interest to the administrative perspective. I think in some measure that’s fair, but not about management and administration per se as so much as about the top level issues in academic libraries. We don’t focus on the specific elements of librarianship quite so much, although you certainly will find articles here about instructing graduate students, conducting virtual reference, that sort of thing. But again, we try to keep the articles focused in a way that lets them speak to the larger academic library community, and to larger concerns.
Steve: There’s an interesting story behind the creation of portal. Could you tell us the story of what happened at the Journal of Academic Librarianship, and of how portal came to be?
Dr. Lowry: Oh, my. Well, I’ve written about it a fair amount, including my first editorial when I moved to the direct management of the journal as editor after Gloriana St. Claire stepped down. So I’ll repeat some of what I wrote there. I was at the time that portal was founded a member of the Journal of Academic Librarianship’s board. I was a feature editor and was responsible for the technology feature, and had been for some years. Dick Daugherty and Ann Daugherty were still the sole proprietors of JAL, asked me to do that. I was at Carnegie Mellon at the time. JAL was thereafter sold to a small publisher and it continued to be quite successful, and I continued with my contributions. Then they sold to Elsevier, and there was a natural, I think, concern on the part of the board. We brought it to the Elsevier management that we did not want to see our journal, and I say that as a considered thing, because there really was a strong sense of ownership in this board of the journal and it’s historic importance to academic librarianship. We did not want to see this journal escalate rapidly in price, and we wanted some commitment from Elsevier about the pricing arrangements and what they would be like. Failing in getting any kind of expression of even interest in our concern, we decided that we would step down and create another journal that we felt was responsive to particular value concerns that we had. And we did that. We were, I thought at the time, and I still do today, very lucky that we easily found a willing publisher who was eager to go forward with establishing a new journal in a space that had been long occupied by several other titles, and that was the Hopkins Press. So we were lucky to have them and their support. I think that we were a fairly successful journal almost from the first issue. We were very quickly cited heavily and appeared in the ISI citation indexes and the use of portal has climbed dramatically over the years. It’s one of the most heavily used journals in Project MUSE in spite of the fact that it’s only now seven years old.
Steve: And that association with Johns Hopkins University Press was with what many people listening to this would know as Project MUSE, the online suite of journals.
Dr. Lowry: That’s correct.
Steve: Portal has been a part of Project MUSE since the inception of portal.
Dr. Lowry: Since day one. It appeared in MUSE right away. But portal does have a print version, and always has. There are not that many print subscriptions to it, and most people I would argue who read portal, read portal in the MUSE electronic environment. But there’s a hard copy of this journal, as well, which still gets some subscribers, particularly individual subscribers who don’t have access to MUSE.
Steve: To a reader of journals who’s not a librarian and is not paying the bills, it could appear that there’s no significant difference between getting a journal through Elsevier’s Science Direct or getting it through Johns Hopkin’s Project MUSE. What do you think professors and students should know about the relative merits of Project MUSE and Science Direct?
Dr. Lowry: Well, I think that Science Direct is a very different kind of publisher. If I can use that word, MUSE isn’t actually the publisher, MUSE contains many things that are just the Hopkins Press. Science Direct is a large commercial venture, whereas MUSE is a not-for-profit venture, and always has been. As a commercial venture, the cost per bit of information in Science Direct is extraordinarily higher than the similar costs to the subscribers that the profile that MUSE has. But I think that if price is any measure, the value for a MUSE journal is much higher, since one doesn’t have to pay as much to get it. It creates a much greater opportunity. There is a long standing battle that I guess I have to say stretched over the entire 35 years of my career as a librarian and library manager, that relates to the acceleration in periodical prices, and I think it’s a well known and well understood issue, if I may use that euphemism. I would argue that anything that we can do to create some price competition and price discipline by creating new journals is a good thing, because I think it’s palpably ridiculous that any publisher of journals should have a 42% profit margin, that’s just a tad excessive compared to almost any industry that I know of. But it is the way things are right now, and I think that a whole debate around Open Access has a great deal to do with this, and very little to do with the merit of any individual journal title. We’re finding that scholarly information is increasingly being priced out of reach, and that the plain fact is that even members of the research library community, members of ARL [Association of Research Libraries] increasingly are faced with dilemmas about what to retain. We have reduced our journal subscriptions and our database subscriptions to electronic resources over the last 3 years every single year in spite of large infusions of new money into the acquisition budget, simply because inflation has so far outstripped the 3 or 4% rate of increase in acquisitions funding from my administration.
Steve: Here at Saint Rose I see an inflation rate from year to year very steadily in the 8-10% range.
Dr. Lowry: Yes, that’s invariably the experience. I think that it has been the case that books haven’t inflated so fast, until recent years. We’re starting to see a similar spike there. One of the challenges, of course, is in some measure our journal costs and database costs are cannibalizing book budgets in order to keep up with those. The result is that the market for the scholarly monograph is in great danger, and the prices are going up because they’re being drug along by database and journal prices, particularly in science, technology, and medicine.
Steve: There is Association of Research Library data, ARL data that supports that strongly, I’ve seen the graphs that show that.
Dr. Lowry: Unquestionably supports it. The empirical evidence is very, very strong. If you look at any number of studies, it’s clear, too, that MUSE is just one example of a not-for-profit university press type publication that is a far greater bargain for the high quality that you get of the journals in that database.
Steve: I was going to ask you about SPARC [Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition], and part of what I was going to ask you’ve already explained, why their activities are important. But can you take a moment to explain what the SPARC organization is, and what their goals are?
Dr. Lowry: Well, SPARC is I guess what one would call a voluntary organization. It is subscribed to by libraries, some publishers are overt and direct supporters of it. SPARC’s primary role has been to, number one, dramatize the challenges particularly of the journal market, and to create opportunities with partners to advance alternatives to the current market structure that we have. In some measure to get us back to the principle that most journal publishers started with, that the purpose of journal publication was to be sure that there was access to the content, not significant profit margins. That’s putting it rather strongly, perhaps in some minds, but I think it really represents accurately what SPARC is about and what we hope SPARC will accomplish.
Steve: Does SPARC officially promote Open Access?
Dr. Lowry: I think SPARC is a very strong ally to Open Access, but one would hasten to add that the definition of Open Access is not a settled matter, and what we mean by Open Access is highly variable across disciplines. If I might take portal as an example, portal can be characterized in some measure as an Open Access journal, because we allow authors to post their publications. Only in the case of institutional repositories do we ask them to even give a nod towards requesting permission, which has always been given freely. The plain fact is that to get portal, you have to subscribe to it, either as an individual subscribing to the hard copy, and/or to the MUSE database. So it’s not Open Access in the same sense that PLoS [Public Library of Science] is. That is to say the funding stream for portal comes from author contributions, and that is put up on the web and anybody can get to it, whether or not they have contributed to it. I’d say though that are probably going to emerge a number of different models for Open Access, and portal is one. One of the important things to remember is that portal remains a bargain for the content. I would say that we want to encourage viable and robust journals that continue to be highly price competitive, and to represent a fair value for their content. The definition of Open Access in some minds is that everything is on the web and everything is for free, but I always hasten to add as an editor that I do have a fiduciary responsibility, and portal costs money. The Hopkins Press has to muster resources. Now, portal has been its first year of publication at least at break even, and now it shows an excess of income over cost. But that excess is not large, and it shouldn’t surprise us that the press needs that kind of an excess in order to manage its whole journal portfolio.
Steve: Do you think some advocates of Open Access ignore, or at least undervalue the role of the publisher and the editor, and don’t pay enough attention to the genuine costs involved in creating a high quality product?
Dr. Lowry: Well, I think there are voices there of people who are just, who tend to be--How can I put this?--ideological about it, and don’t really take that into account. But I think by and large most voices, at least in the library community that are supporters of Open Access understand that the viable journal costs money to produce. It’s certainly the case that we know that you have got maybe two polar extremes here. Maybe there’s the PLoS version where it is completely supported by the contributions of those people who are published within its pages.
Steve: We should take a moment to explain what PLoS is—it’s the Public Library of Science.
Dr. Lowry: Public Library of Science, and it’s first journal title was PLoS Biology, and the model--I think they, at the risk of misspeaking myself here--I think they had some Mellon money to begin, and are moving towards a fully self-funded model in which author page charges are what the publication survives on. That is to say, authors provide money when their articles are approved, and that money is what helps PLoS stay in business, and do its editorial work and support itself and continue to provide the technology. It’s a completely online journal now, I don’t know if they still produce a hard copy. But that’s a model that works very well perhaps in the science area like biology, where virtually everybody who contributes has a research grant, and/or institutional subvention. Some would argue, well, that’s the way we ought to do it for all journals. But I think that most of what is published in the world of academic research tends to come from the larger research institutions. What that says in effect is the larger research institutions should fund the full advance, or the full exposition of their knowledge through journals and other means, and everybody else would get it for nothing. So you have the free rider issue. At the perhaps opposite extreme of Open Access would be a journal like portal, that really still continues to have a traditional journal profile, but allows it authors to exercise robustly their own copyrights. At the same time there’s a risk in this model, because if everything in portal’s covers were immediately available, which I have to say it is not, on the web, the amount of activity in MUSE itself would decline. The budgeting model for MUSE is that journals are given, awarded I should say, income based on the amount of activity of the journal title itself. So the fact that portal is a journal that does better than break even is a function of the fact that people read it online in MUSE. If it were immediately and completely available elsewhere, my guess is we’d have a declining use of it in the MUSE environment, which means that even though there would be high use of it, it wouldn’t be reflected in a way that produced a contribution that allowed for a balanced bottom line.
Steve: Is the revenue from MUSE sufficient to sustain the journal, or do you need the revenue from the print subscription to break even?
Dr. Lowry: The revenue from the print subscription is almost enough to pay for the print subscription. I think it sort of wavers around the line of break even. It has never been enough to support the entire activity of the journal. If it weren’t for MUSE, the Hopkins Press would be experiencing a significant net loss on portal, at least the last time I looked at the figures, which was a year ago. So MUSE is essential. It’s not surprising that MUSE is where we get most of our use. The plain fact is that we now all get aggravated when the article we want to see isn’t immediately available online, because that has become the modality that we are familiar with, because of its convenience.
Steve: Do you think Hopkins Press will continue creating the print subscription for those who want to receive it that way?
Dr. Lowry: You know, I can’t answer that question. We have made the case that we ought to just forget about it. My board would be okay with doing that, and we’ve suggested it to them. There’s still the world of sales, in which having a sample copy has some impact, believe it or not. Putting it out on the table and having people look at it is a way of representing the fact that this is a journal entity. You may remember that when PLoS Biology first came out, they produced a hard copy of it.
Steve: I remember getting the sample issue.
Dr. Lowry: Yeah. Why did they do that? Well, they did it because that’s the conceptual framework that we still operate in, in some significant measure about journals. Although, when old fuddies like myself are gone, I’m sure people will establish journals and never give second thought to the idea that they need a print artifact.
Steve: Charles, what do you enjoy most about editing portal?
Dr. Lowry: Oh, gee [laughs]. Well. I really have. . . this is the second time for me. I co-founded another journal with Don Riggs many years ago, an association journal called Library Administration and Management. I just have had a long-term personal commitment to the notion of advancing the field through research and expression of best practices, because we are a practice discipline, if you want to call librarianship that. It’s essential to emphasize the exposition of the knowledge that is being developed about and around what a library is, what librarians do, and what an academic library is as an institution. So I think it’s absolutely critical for the success of academic librarianship and for academic libraries to have a strong literature. Not just as a library manager, but as a library school faculty member who’s taught for many years, it’s just for me, remained a core interest of my own. I guess the most, the biggest kick I get out of it is that I’ve worked in and played something of central role in the creation of an important journal that expresses our profession, and expresses the role of academic libraries as institutions within higher education. Well, it’s also kind of fun, I have to say to recruit articles. Invariably for me, when I’m listening to somebody give a speech, even if it’s not fully baked, I think, “Gee, does this have a core?” Is this something important that ought to be heard beyond this little event today, with this individual standing up in front of an audience, and is portal a place that would serve for that purpose. I do a lot of the recruiting for journal articles that we’ve had. I’ve done this simply because of valuing the opportunity to spread good thinking, I guess is the best way to describe it. One of the things portal has done is really emphasize mentoring. We have become something of a place where we get a lot of neophytes, beginners who are submitting articles because they know we welcome that. I have to attribute the notion that we should have this kind of a profile to Gloriana St. Claire, who with Sue Barton and I founded the journal. She thought we really needed to do this, instead of just simply throwing a journal article away because it wasn’t good enough for publishing now, wasn’t really fair if it had potential, and there was some way to help the author develop it. So we’ve emphasized that role. I think that’s been kind of a unique niche that portal has filled. Those are the principal things that drive me, and I guess in some measure as an editor you’ve got a bully pulpit. While I do recruit articles and editorial features from my board and others as guest editorials, I do get a chance to spout off every once in a while and say what I think in a very public way that’s memorialized. That’s kind of an enviable position to be in.
Steve: It sure is, and Charles Lowry this has been another venue for doing that, but believe it or not our time is expired. So thank you very much for being my guest on Periodical Radio.
Dr. Lowry: Great talking to you, Steve.