Libraries and Learning
Just Business
August 8, 2017
One of the reasons so many librarians felt angry about Elsevier’s acquisition of Bepress is that Elsevier has become an enemy of libraries and what they stand for. Elsevier would, naturally, disagree, but their business practices, like those of four other giants (Wiley, Taylor & Francis, Springer/Nature, and SAGE) seem predatory and destructive from the library perspective. As they have grown bigger, their power has grown, and their prices and negotiating power makes libraries incredibly vulnerable. Not just libraries: a lot of books have not been bought because these five publishers gobble more and more of static library budgets.
But there’s another reason that deserves some unpacking. Bepress is just a very attractive but empty platform without the stuff we put in it. Libraries that chose it did so in order to help their communities make things – and make them public. We paid for a useful box to put stuff in, and because it’s our labor and our stuff that made Bepress worth acquiring, it feels as if somebody stole our stuff.
Mind you, platforms matter. Bepress was attractive, relatively easy to use, and was smart about aggregation and discoverability. The open source alternatives available are not an option for small libraries that don’t have technical staff (and when you’re small, there’s a good chance HR and higher administrators decide what happens with library positions. If someone leaves, that line may vanish. If you say you want to convert an existing position to do tech, the powers that be might decide that line should be given to the IT department. Sometimes you have to advance with one arm and part of another tied behind your back.) Tactically, outsourcing your tech needs to Bepress was a sensible way to move forward. Moving forward means fighting the big guys with their big deals by helping faculty and students publish without them, by taking on new roles within existing constraints, by trying something rather than simply wring our hands about the serials crisis. So it was taking on Elsevier by making things that could be shared on our terms.
Libraries are used to vendors changing hands; merger mania is in full swing among library vendors. It’s a pain, but it’s what it is. There’s something different about having a platform that hosts stuff you helped to build sold out from under you. This is why people get upset when Facebook and Twitter and Instagram change up their rules, or when Amazon buys Goodreads after Amazon failed at social. It’s a reminder that our stuff, our creations, our hard work curating and formatting and building community, is incredibly valuable – but it isn’t ours.
This, of course, is exactly what got us in trouble in the first place. By letting large profit-oriented publishers take over society journal publishing and scholars’ copyrights, we became hostages to an unsustainable business model. Now there’s another business model on the ascendant, one that gives us p