portal: Libraries and the Academy

Through portal

Gloriana St. Clair
Managing Editor

The traditional burden of the volume 1, number 1 editorial is to expound the reasons for the creation of a new journal. Sue Martin, Charles Lowry, the editorial board members, the mentors, The Johns Hopkins University Press, and I began this venture with deliberate and weighty goals. While we were reacting to Elsevier's takeover of several journals in librarianship and general social sciences, we were also acting to achieve these focused objectives:

• To offer an affordable alternative to serials that have gone up an average of 9 percent a year while the consumer price index increased only 3.3 percent;

• To provide a more inviting, constructive, and productive environment for authors;

• To model a scholarly communications system as outlined in recent pronouncements from the Association of American Universities (AAU) and the Create Change initiative. ¹

This editorial discusses how we intend to achieve these three major objectives through portal.

Affordable alternative

University presses offer a high-quality alternative to their commercial counterparts. While some commercial presses report gross profit margins of 40 percent with annual profits between 20 and 30 percent annually, university presses only cover their costs and in the past have often received subsidies from their universities. Ray English and Larry Hardesty have called the commercial pricing practices "fundamentally unjust," and a governor of an engineering society called them "extortion." ² The difference between commercial presses and university presses allows the latter to price their journals in more reasonable ways. Thus, portal will sell for $48 to individuals and $145 to institutions. portal's prices will NOT increase at the fourteen year 9 percent average or even the newly offered 7 percent a year (Elsevier's current selected long term contract rate). portal will be a journal that individuals and libraries can afford. [End Page 5]

Environment for authors

The major journals in most disciplines have prided themselves on their high rejection rates. The rationale has been that a high rejection rate signifies a strong commitment to and compelling evidence of quality. Nothing could be more wasteful of the scarce resources for library research than to replicate a system that encourages authors to create a finished product to be judged and rejected. In my tenure at College & Research Libraries, two out of every three submissions were rejected. The portal board and editors want to help authors from the moment they decide to engage in research to the moment when they elect to submit the finished product either to portal or to some other journal. Precious librarian research resources should be encouraged and fostered.

To accomplish that, portal is creating a mentoring system for authors. Experts will be available to consult with authors about topic selection and identification, about issues around statistical sampling and survey design, and around the crafting of the article itself. Early intervention in the process should allow authors to expend their energies on projects that can be accepted for publication by an independent set of referees. Two groups from the American Library Association--the Library Administration and Management Association Research Committee and the Library Research Round Table--have taken an interest in providing mentoring for potential portal authors. Several other librarians have volunteered for this program also. Authors who think they would benefit from the assistance of a mentor should contact Gloriana St. Clair, as should individuals who want to act as mentors. Requests for mentoring should be sent to the Managing Editor (gstclair@andrew.cmu.edu).

Scholarly Communications Model

In June, 2000, the American Association of Universities and the Association for Research Libraries recommended to university faculty and administrators nine issues to "guide the transformation of the scholarly publishing system." The first of these, containing costs, has already been discussed. portal also models best practices in the other eight characteristics:

• Electronic capabilities should be used to provide access. portal will appear in both print and electronic formats. Subscribers will have access to articles as they become available on the portal web site (http://www.muse.jhu.edu/journals/pla)

• Scholarly publications should be archived in a secure, permanent manner. portal will be available in Project MUSE^®, a repository of journal articles in the humanities, social sciences, and mathematics. The Johns Hopkins University Press is committed to providing permanent maintenance and preservation of all digital files in the Project MUSE^® database.

• Processes for evaluating the quality of scholarly work should continue and readers should be able to read in the publication about the evaluation process. portal will be double-blind refereed and the board represents a collection of eminent librarians from around the country. The editors have an aggregate of two dozen years of experience with College & Research Libraries, Journal of Academic Librarianship, Library Administration and Management, and several other journals. [End Page 6]

• The balance in copyright law achieved through exceptions and limitations to exclusive proprietary rights must be preserved in the digital environment. Faculty should manage copyright so that they may use their own work in research and teaching. portal authors will retain the right to use their own work in their research and teaching. Articles will flow freely in the educational system without charge.

• Faculty should assign rights in a manner that promotes ready use and should choose journals that support the goal of making scholarly publications available at a reasonable cost. This journal uses an author friendly copyright assignment statement and meets the cost containing prescriptions of the AAU's pronouncement.

• Time from submission to publication should be reduced. The editorial board has committed itself to a timely refereeing process so that authors can have quick feedback on their work. In addition, the electronic version will bring articles out more quickly than the paper bundled alternative.

• Evaluation of faculty should place a greater emphasis on quality of publication relative to quantity. This prescription is beyond the purview of the journal, but individual board members and editors will advocate for this principle on their campuses in committees, faculty senates, and other appropriate venues.

• Scholars should be assured privacy with regard to their use of materials in both print and electronic environments. Some members of an audience of engineers I discussed these tenets with recently could not comprehend the importance of this assurance. For librarians, however, the commitment to privacy represents a crucial part of a highly regarded and long revered code of ethics. Both portal and Project MUSE^® provide strong protections for the reader.

The Create Change initiative among the Association of Research Libraries, the Association of College and Research Libraries, and SPARC encourage librarians to be active on their campuses in helping faculty in all disciplines to rethink their practices. In additional discussing Michael Rosenweig's Evolutionary Ecology Research and the Theory of Logic Programming examples, librarians will also be able to laud the creation of portal as a best practice for scholarly communications.

The governors of Acta Metallurgica, to whom I made a presentation on June 2, understand that increases in serials prices are "killing libraries." ³ Many of them are active library users and serve on library committees around the world. While discipline faculty must be the ones to create the change, librarians can supply helpful ideas and information to foster that change. And librarians alone can change communications in our discipline. In committing ourselves to this new journal venture, portal editors and board members model a reasonable next step that illustrates the AAU's best practices. Librarians worldwide can participate in this change by submitting to portal, subscribing to portal, reading portal, and going through this portal into the future.

Notes

1. Denise K. Megner,"Seeking a Radical Change in the Role of Publishing," Chronicle of Higher Education, 16 June 2000, A16-17.

2. Ray English and Larry Hardesty, "Create Change: Shaping the Future of Scholarly Journal Publishing," C&RL News (June 2000): 515-518.

3. English and Hardesty, p. 517; Acta Metallurgica Governor's Meeting, June 2, 2000. Kauai, Hawaii.