Every day, smart people tell us that the Internet creates a conflict between individuals and institutions, and that the individuals win. In particular, we are promised that the Internet is a way to destroy institutions. You have an institution you don't like? The Internet will destroy it for you. Don't like the government? The Internet is shutting it down. Sick of the phone company? It's toast. Hate college professors? The Internet is going to put them on the street. It's a happy thing, this discourse, because everyone has an institution that they want to destroy. Me, I want to destroy academic journal publishers. It's a slight ambition, I know, but it would give me real pleasure. The job of an academic journal publisher is to take my work for $0, add almost no value to it, and sell it to my library for way too much money. Why can they do this? Well, I have to give my work away to these parasites because the resulting publications are how the university knows that I've been working. The parasites then have a monopoly on my work, because it's intellectual property and because it is not substitutable -- buying someone else's article would not serve the same need as buying mine, that having been the whole point of the refereeing process that caused my article to be accepted by the journal in the first place. And the poor librarians are caught in the middle, since the people who edit and consume the journals are not the ones who have to pay for them. If I were a librarian then I would engage in a lot more guerrilla theater to dramatize the severity of the problem, but then most librarians are a lot nicer than I am.

The right answer is for researchers to publish their journals online in a cooperative fashion, either on their own or through universities and professional organizations. Some of this is happening, of course, but not enough, and not very fast. I contribute my two cents when I am invited to serve on an editorial board, but that's only two cents. What I can do, though, is resist the parasites at the point of the copyright grab. When I have an article accepted for publication in an academic journal, the journal publisher sends me a legal form in which I sign over the copyright to my article. This is reasonable in the case of a newspaper or magazine, since they buy intellectual property for real money and then sell it to pay their bills. But it is not reasonable for a journal publisher, which does not pay its authors and which contributes nothing that a cooperative publishing organization could not do much more cheaply on the Web. So whenever I get one of those form contracts from a journal publisher, I always get out a pen and edit it. Mostly I write in the margin, "I reserve the right to post the paper on my Web site". That's why all of the papers that I have published since I got tenure are available on my home page, where they are much more widely read than they would be in a journal alone, and where they publicize the journal as well. None of the publishers has ever refused, although I gather that a couple of them might have complained to the journal editors. But just to make sure, I sit on the form for a while so that the journal's production process would be fouled up if the publisher did not accept my terms. If a publisher actually did reject my terms, I would just say "tough" and walk away. There are plenty of other journals out there, and I have plenty of other publications in the pipe. Besides, that's what tenure is for.

I have a hokey economic theory of this situation. The academic world would save tons of money if it moved to a cooperative publishing model, so why doesn't it? Some people claim that the real problem is irrational prejudice against online journals, but I don't believe that. I have published in a perfectly respected online journal, the Journal of Artificial Intelligence Research, whose editors saw a political opportunity -- a generational shift, really -- to create a new center of gravity in their field to compete with the establishment journal, Artificial Intelligence, and whose publisher, Morgan Kaufmann, was enough of a tech-oriented newcomer to be interested in pioneering a smart new publishing model. Now, JAIR is kind of a special case, given that AI's formative history of centralized management by ARPA left it with a highly developed, highly standardized infrastructure, whose universal adoption makes it easy to build things like online journals. Still, I don't believe the irrational-prejudice theory.

Instead, start with coordination costs -- the money and effort that it would take to get all of the players at all of the universities to move to a new model. The real problem is that the existing journals are more prestigious because they've been around for a long time and have accumulated the best editors and the longest history of quality work. A new journal might have an incentive to go online in order to be cheap and promote sales. But the editors of the established journals don't suffer from the high cost of their journals, so they have no incentive to move. Their own universities benefit more from having control of the prestigious journal than they do from the cost of subscribing to it, so no institutional lever can make them move. And even those editors who really want to move to a cooperative model (including some on this list) face massive first-mover disadvantages because the necessary software and institutional routines have not developed. So here's my hokey theory: the journal publishers are able to extract rents -- that is, profits that would not exist in a genuine competitive market -- that are equal to the coordination effort that would be required to move to a cooperative model, minus one dollar. In other words, the publishers can turn up the pain to just below the level that it would take to compel the editors and universities and professional associations to finally get moving and get organized and solve the problem.

Lest this sound too depressing, Hal Varian points out that, according to this model, the rents extracted by journal publishers ought to go down as the technology for online cooperative publishing improves. What this suggests to me is that a university or foundation that wanted to make a long-term investment in solving the problem could sponsor the creation of an open-standard software platform for solving all of the coordination problems in academic publishing. This would include submitting and refereeing articles, managing the editorial workflow, maintaining up-to-date contact information for everyone, implementing site licenses etc if money changes hands, selling printed and bound copies of the journal for people who want them, and so on. It would also include legal and institutional arrangements to ease the coordination problems of moving existing journals to the new systems. The idea would be to enable the editors of existing journals to move over to the emerging cooperative mechanisms just by hitting a switch. The good news is, if Varian's argument is right, the mere existence of this infrastructure would reduce the magnitude of the problem -- even if nobody ever used it! Again, I realize that a lot of this is already happening. But perhaps if consciousness became general of the central role of coordination problems then more activity and resources could be focused on building consensus and writing code in this area.

I see a much bigger lesson here. Many of the efficiencies that become possible with cheap, pervasive networking cannot be captured by a single organization. Instead, they cut across the analogous parts of all organizations. Thus a single university would save almost no money -- indeed, it would probably lose huge amounts of it -- if it tried to reform journal publishing just for its own people. Thus the savings will only come if a critical mass of universities moves in a coordinated fashion in the same direction. Likewise, imagine if all the universities merged their bursars' offices into one organization that handled tuition payments for everyone according to a uniform set of practices. Of course, that kind of standardization could be a bad thing if there were an educational advantage to running one's bursar's office in a distinctive way, but let's put that issue aside right now.

The question is, assuming that important efficiencies can be captured by a coordinated institutional transition, by what mechanism will the necessary transition be organized? One option is that the various higher education professional associations will house the coordination activity. There is certainly a university presidents' association, and I assume that there is a bursars' association as well. But what if no single individual staff person or member of the association has the necessary incentives to dedicate ten years of their career to that particular coordination project? It would be like herding cats, after all, getting all of the various universities to agree on anything.

There is another option: outsourcing. An entrepreneur could see an opportunity to approach universities and say, "I can save you $XXX per year if you simply let me run your bursar's office". This would only work if a sufficiently large number of universities moved at once, but predicting in advance how many customers will buy your proposition is what entrepreneurship is all about. So now some very large number of universities all decide to outsource their bursar's office. Then they decide to outsource something else, like perhaps Chemistry 101, which the faculty usually aren't enthusiastic about teaching and where huge opportunities exist for economies of scale. Then something else, and then something else, and so on. It should be said that outsourcing is hardly a new phenomenon in the university. After all, that's what textbooks are: outsourcing the reading materials for one's course (albeit having the students buy them and not the university) rather than writing all of the necessary reading materials oneself. And it's hard to see what on balance is lost by outsourcing the food service in the student union, which was never very good anyway.

The question is how far this trend will go. Will the Internet (and a dozen other important information and communications technologies) facilitate a major wave of university outsourcing, and if so should we care? Perhaps while we're all off worrying about the university collapsing in the face of no-frills online competitors, the real danger to the university institution and the values it serves will be a hollowing-out from outsourcing, like being pecked to death by ducks. It will be important, in my view, for the university community and the broader society to decide now which kinds of efficiencies through outsourcing serve the public good by making education more accessible, which kinds (e.g., scholarly journal publishing) should be resisted in favor of a cooperative model organized by the universities themselves, and which kinds should be resisted altogether because of the social harm that large-scale standardization would bring. It is not a simple question. Standardization can be bad without anything being wrong with the standard itself; as a result, uncoordinated institutions that make outsourcing decisions may, in violation of Kant's categorical imperative, focus too much on their own interests and not enough on the collective harm that would result if everyone followed their lead. That's why, even when outsourcing does appear to be an economically viable mechanism of institutional transition, it's important for the universities' own coordination mechanisms to keep working, both at the level of the administration and that of the faculty.

Phil Agre's December 26, 1999 comments on academic journals, copyright and the Internet. http://www.tao.ca/wind/rre/0815.html
 

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