The Concerned Librarian’s Guide to the 2012 ALA Midwinter Exhibit Hall

With a number of issues floating around libraryland at the present moment, there has been talk in some of the my social circles about what to do about them. Specifically, how to approach tackling them as it relates to library vendors who have expressed support for legislation that has the potential to impede or block access to information (directly or as collateral damage). As the ALA Midwinter Meeting is just around the corner, I thought it would be a perfect opportunity for librarians to meet with company representatives to discuss their concerns about current contentious legislation (such as the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and the Research Works Act (RWA)) as well as ongoing concerns (such as library eBook lending). Lest some perseverate or advocate for delaying action, our professional conferences are the best venue to voice our concerns face-to-face for the wide array of actions that have the potential to interfere with information access and exchange. This is not the time to waiver on our values and principles.

Over the last couple of days, I have examined 424* conference exhibitors to determine their support (if any) for either of these pieces of legislation. In addition, I’ve made note of any publishing companies outside of the Big Six that offer eBooks. I believe that eBooks are an essential conversation that librarians should have with smaller publishing operations and to perform inquiries as to what policies they have about library lending (if any) and how the library can work with them so as to include their content in our collections. It is in these introductory conversations that I hope can lead to better and more promising arrangements for our communities and institutions.

* My list was current as of 1/3/12. They have since added 7 vendors to which I have not researched.

The Stop Online Piracy Act

Here are a list of supporters as supplied by Representative Lamar Alexander, Chairman of the Judiciary Committee. (I’ve placed their exhibit booth number next to their names.)

• Association of American Publishers (more on them later)
• Cengage Learning [2219]
• Disney Publishing Worldwide [1423]
• Elsevier [2229, 2333]
• Hachette Book Group [1613]
• HarperCollins Publishers Worldwide [1528, 1529]
• Hyperion [n/a]
• MacMillan [1509, 1510, 1511]
• McGraw-Hill Education (Part of the McGraw-Hill companies) [920]
• Penguin Group (USA), Inc. [1426]
• Random House [1728, 1729]
• Scholastic, Inc. [1327, 1328]
• The Perseus Book Group [1644]
• W.W. Norton & Company [1522]

Within the member’s list of the Association of American Publishers (AAP) there are a number of ALA exhibitors. It should also be noted that their Board of Directors has executives from the companies listed above as well as other library vendor companies. Here are AAP members who will be exhibitors:

• Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), Inc. [2533]
• AIP/Publishing [735]
• American Psychological Association [2245]
• Cambridge University Press [1251]
• Columbia University Press [2456]
• Galaxy Press [1454]
• Grove/Atlantic, Inc. [1544, 1545]
• Houghton Mifflin Harcourt [1628]
• Ingram Content Group, Ingram Coutts [829]
• John Wiley & Sons [1129]
• Library of Congress [1829]
• Morgan & Claypool Publishers [704]
• Oxford University Press [1205]
• Simon & Schuster, Inc. [1605]
• Star Bright Books [1638]
• Sterling Publishing Company [1417]
• University of California Press – Journals [2451]
• Wolters Kluwer Health/Ovid [1744]
• Workman Publishing [1339]

NOTE: It should be stressed that association membership does not necessarily confer support for everything the association does. Of all people, ALA members should be able to able to understand that fine distinction. This doesn’t mean that you cannot approach these vendors about the actions being taken by their professional association.

Here are some other exhibitors worth mentioning but need a little explanation.

• Abington Press (a member of the Church Music Publisher’s Association, which is a SOPA supporter) [1458]
• Alexander Street Press (partners with companies that are AAP members) [2016]
• JSTOR & Portico (part of ITHAKA which is an AAP member) [2405]
• LexisNexis & LexisNexis Academic & Library Solutions (parent company is Elsevier) [2329]
• Listening Library (parent company is Random House) [1728]
• Nature Publishing Group (a division of MacMillan) [2010]
• Palgrave MacMillan (part of the MacMillan group) [1305]
• RAND State Statistics (parent company RAND is an AAP member) [742]
• S&P Capital IQ (a subsidiary of McGraw-Hill) [924]
• Wall Street Journal (owned by NewsCorp, a SOPA supporter) [2512]
• Tor-Forge Books (part of the MacMillan group) [1505]
• University of Tennessee School of Information Science (their university press is part of the AAP) [721]

Furthermore, after seeing the list of the AAP Board of Directors, I did some deeper examinations into a few library organizations and companies. Again, I will absolutely stress that any connections do not equate to support for actions associated with the organizations nor does it mean that individuals will be able to influence policy. I am simply relating what I found because I find connections (even casual ones) interesting.

• ALA Treasurer James Neal is Vice President for Information Services & University Librarian for Columbia University. Columbia University Press is an AAP member.
• OCLC President & CEO Jay Jordan serves on the Governing Board of Publishing for the American Chemical Society, an AAP member which also has representation on their board of directors. He also serves on the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science (SILS) Board of Visitors; University of North Carolina Press is an AAP member. Also from OCLC, Vice President Lorcan Dempsey serves as a member of the Cambridge University Library Visiting Committee; Cambridge University Press is an AAP member. Edward Barry, Vice Chair of OCLC’s Board of Trustees, is a President Emeritus of Oxford University Press which is (as you guessed it) an AAP member.

In approaching vendors to talk about this issue, I’d suggest doing some research and coming up with some talking points and questions you want to ask. Jessamyn West has a great post about SOPA and libraries which includes links to other resources. Plagiarism Today has a wonderful blog post about avoiding the SOPA hype (both for and against) which is worth reading as well. On the more technical and legal side, the Stanford Law Review covers the nuts and bolts of what the bill would do. Eric Hellman talks about what it can mean for foreign libraries. Finally, Wikipedia General Counsel Geoff Brigham offers an excellent analysis of what the bill would do to the internet and to Wikipedia.

EDIT: Springer [2039] is actually Springer Science + Business Media, not Springer Publishing. They are supporters of Open Access. Thanks to Heather from Springer SBM for pointing out that out! I won’t have a chance to update the map, so be nice!

THE RESEARCH WORKS ACT

While this legislation is not as broad as SOPA, it does create ripples of effect in the academic/scholarly publishing world. SPARC sums it up:

Essentially, the bill seeks to prohibit federal agencies from conditioning their grants to require that articles reporting on publicly funded research be made accessible to the public online.

Or, as better and more specifically explained by Cory Doctorow on BoingBoing:

That bill would prohibit all federal agencies from putting any privately published articles into an online database, even — and this is the kicker — those articles based on research funded by the public if they have received “any value-added contribution, including peer review or editing” from a private publisher. This is a direct attack on the National Institutes of Health’s PubMed Central, the massive free online repository of articles resulting from research funded with NIH dollars.

[…] NIH’s public-access policy, which requires authors who receive any NIH funding to contribute their work to PubMed Central within 12 months of publication.

The nexus of the uproar originates from a press release from the American Association of Publishers endorsing the bill. Basically, it creates a situation where the public would be required to purchase access to research projects and papers that are the result of publically funded grants and programs. (Or, as one title of a blog post on the topic put it, “You buy the cow, then I’ll sell you the milk.”)

Dorothea Salo went through the AAP member list and I matched it to the ALA vendor list to come up with a list of exhibitors who will financially benefit or otherwise be effected or influenced by the Research Works Act. Her criteria is as follows:

• Remove book publishers unless they have an obvious journal arm
  (for example, Macmillan owns Nature Publishing Group.);
• Keep scholarly societies;
• Keep university presses unless they’re Rockefeller University Press;
• Remove most service bureaux and other metavendors (I did leave one
  or two on; judgment call)

Here is the resulting list of ALA exhibitor vendors along with their space numbers:

• American Psychological Association [2245]
• Association for Computing Machinery [2533]
• Cambridge University Press [1251]
• Columbia University Press [2456]
• Elsevier & LexisNexis [2229, 2333] [2329]
• John Wiley & Sons, Inc. [1129]
• Macmillan & Macmillan Magazines and Journals [1509, 1510, 1511]
• Oxford University Press [1205]
• RAND Corporation [742]
• University of California Press [2451]
• Wolters Kluwer [1744]

Like SOPA, I would suggest formulating some talking points and questions before you approach any vendors that provide journal publishing and/or access. John Dupuis has an extremely thorough collection of RWA related posts that provide many different angles and opinions on the issue. There’s also a great New York Times OpEd piece that nails the issues and the concerns. These are good starting points into the creation of talking points.

While you’re at it, you might want to make yourself familiar with the Open access movement in publishing. Peter Suber offers a large and comprehensive overview of Open Access which can answer a lot of questions (and possibly raise a few others). Take the time to read it over and ask vendors about how they feel about it.

I felt that it is important to include a list of AAP members who will not be exhibiting at ALA Midwinter, but still stand to benefit from the RWA legislation. For those of you who are not going to the conference, consider contacting any of these vendors that you deal with in the course of your work for their stance on RWA.

• American Academy of Pediatrics
• American Anthropological Association
• American Association for Cancer Research
• American Association for the Advancement of Science
• American Chemical Society
• American Dental Association Publishing
• American Discovery Publishing
• American Foundation for the Blind
• American Geophysical Union
• American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics
• American Institute of Physics
• American Mathematical Society
• American Medical Association
• American Nurses Association
• American Physiological Society
• American Psychiatric Publishing, Inc.
• American Scholars Press
• American Society of Clinical Oncology
• ASIS International
• Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology
• Fordham University Press
• Gallaudet University Press
• Georgetown University Press
• Harvard Business Review Group
• Harvard University Press
• HighWire Press- Stanford University
• Human Factors and Ergonomics Society
• Institute of Electrical & Electronics Engineers, Inc.
• International Association for the Study of Pain
• Johns Hopkins University Press
• Journal of Rehabilitation Research & Development
• Modern Language Association of America
• New England Journal of Medicine
• New York Botanical Gardens Press
• NYU Press
• Oncology Nursing Society
• Optical Society of America
• Pearson Education
• Peterson Institute for International Economics
• Princeton University Press
• SAGE Publications
• Silverchair Science & Communications
• Society for Applied Spectroscopy
• Stanford University Press
• Thieme Medical Publisher
• University of Chicago Press
• University of Hawaii Press
• University of Illinois Press
• University of North Carolina Press
• University of Tennessee Press
• University of Texas Press
• The Wildlife Society
• The Woodrow Wilson Center Press
• Yale University Press

Honorable mention goes to MIT Press which has come out against RWA in an email from their director Ellen Faran:

“The AAP’s press release on the Research Works Act does not reflect the position of the MIT Press; nor, I imagine, the position of many other scholarly presses whose mission is centrally focused on broad dissemination. We will not, however, withdraw from the AAP on this issue as we value the Association’s work overall and the opportunity to participate as a member of the larger and diverse publishing community.”

Another honorable mention goes to BioMed Central [1860] and their embrace of Open Access policies.

EDIT: As people in the comments have pointed out, “National Academies Press has since 1994 made all their works available for free online, and as of June 2011 now offer all their PDFs as free downloads:http://www8.nationalacademies.org/onpine/newsitem.aspx?RecordID=06022011“. They are still AAP members, but they deserve an honorable mention as well. Sorry for the mixup, but thanks for the clarification!

EDIT: JSTOR & Portico [2405] disavows the RWA, but will continue to stay with the AAP. Same for Pennsylvania State University Press.

EDIT: Springer [2039] is actually Springer Science + Business Media, not Springer Publishing. They are supporters of Open Access. Thanks to Heather from Springer SBM for pointing out that out! I won’t have a chance to update the map, so be nice!

[Once again, many heartfelt thanks to Dorothea for her invaluable help for this section. I literally could not have done it without her. -A]

eBooks

When I was examining all the exhibitors, I made a note of publishers that offer eBooks. I would encourage my fellow librarians to stop and have a chat with the people at these companies to see what their policies are, what their plans are (if any) for library lending, and how we can help them make their books available to the public while assuaging their concerns.

Here’s a list of the non-AAP member non-Big Six Publishers vendors who offer eBooks in one form or another:

• 3M Library Systems [2239]
• Abrams Books [1604]
• Alibris [825]
• Allen Press, Inc. [2453]
• AltaMira Press [913]
• Ambassador Books and Media [1944]
• America Speaks Spanish [1717]
• Bearport Publishing Co. [1710]
• Bloomsbury / Walker Books for Young Readers [1506]
• Bloomsbury Academic [1501]
• Casemate Publishers [2509]
• Chafie Press [1456]
• De Gruyter [1720]
• DK Publishing Inc. [1432]
• Dorrance Publishing Company [1824]
• EBL-Ebook Library [1851]
• ebrary / EBSCO Information Services [2207]
• Eerdmans Books for Young Readers [1413]
• Egmont USA [1633]
• Emery-Pratt Company [1404]
• Facet Publishing [1905]
• Gareth Stevens Publishing [2421]
• Greenwood [931]
• Groundwoods Books [1544, 1545]
• IGI Global [939]
• Infobase Learning [2022]
• James Lorimer & Company, Inc. [1556]
• Lerner Publishing Group [1832]
• Lexington Books [913]
• Mackin Education Resources [2409]
• Marshall Cavendish Corp [1828]
• Midlandia Press [1557]
• OECD [822]
• Omnigraphics, Inc. [1824]
• Orca Book Publishers [1712]
• Peachtree Publishers [1704]
• Pickering & Chatto Publishers [1261]
• Rosen Publishing Group [2305]
• Rowan & Littlefield Publishers [913]
• Scarecrow Press [913]
• Swets [1105]
• Taylor & Francis Group [1245]
• Transaction Publishers [2455]
• University Press of America [913]
• World Almanac [2022]
• Zondervan/Zonderkidz [1535]

I don’t have a listing of Overdrive’s partners or if they work with other library or library consortiums, so some of these publishers might already be working with public libraries. If so, offer them thanks on behalf of the profession for working with us to bring their content to our members.

And just in case you forgot, here’s a listing of the Big Six Publishers and their respective library eBook lending policies.

• Hachette – This company formerly allowed library eBook lending, but stopped in 2009. (Source) It claims to be reconsidering that decision. (Source)  [1613]
• HarperCollins – Library eBooks licenses purchased are limited to 26 checkouts before they have to be repurchased. (Source) [1528, 1529]
• MacMillan – This company does not allow its eBooks to be lent by libraries. (Source) [1509, 1510, 1511]
• Penguin – A few months back, they pulled of their library eBooks. While they have restored older titles, at present they do not make new titles available for library eBook lending. (Source) [1426, 1429]
• Random House – This company allows library lending of its eBooks, but has stated that it is currently evaluating that policy. (Source) [1728, 1729] (I’d give these people our thanks for their cooperation in working with us on eBooks. They deserve it. –A)
• Simon & Schuster – This company does not allow its eBooks to be lent by libraries. (Source) [1605]

You may want to pay these publishers a visit as well to express your concerns about their library eBook lending practices (and, for Random House, our appreciation of their partnership).

You and Your Trip to the Exhibit Hall

In order to make best use of your time at ALA MW and not have to go completely blind trying to mark down exhibitor numbers on your exhibit hall map, I’ve taken the liberty of creating a color coded map for ease of use. It is sized for 8”x11” landscape printing, but you can print it out in any size you need.

Click to embiggen.

You can also download a copy of this picture from my Flickr account.

In Closing

Lest people forget, we are customers to these companies. As a target consumer demographic, we do have certain economic based powers within the relationship. Personally, I’m all in favor of diplomacy in opening communications and conversations with the people who provide the content for the communities we serve. But there is and should be limits to the terms and conditions under which we will purchase or license their content for our members. Without vendors to provide content, we are limited in our offerings; but without communities to support us and trust in our business practices, we are nothing. We cannot abdicate our fiduciary responsibilities to make the best use of the resources our communities give us to spend or use on their behalf in the name of providing them with the best, latest, or greatest when the requirements for such content are unreasonable, unfair, or unsustainable.

If you use this post as a guide, good luck, good judgment, and remember to be a good ambassador for the profession and your community.

Now, go kick some ass.

Aftermath

Here’s a district dispatch from the ALA Washington Office. Also, here’s a release from the Special Libraries Association (SLA). The Council on Library Information Resources just realized that they are AAP members, much to their own chagrin.

Eagle eyed Iris Jastram noticed that AAP changed their press release supporting RWA by removing a portion from a  paragraph without any editing indication. The passage removed read:

“Additionally, it would preempt federal agencies’ planned funding, development and back-office administration of their own electronic repositories for such works, which would duplicate existing copyright-protected systems and unfairly compete with established university, society and commercial publishers.”

Before/After:

     

They also added a link entitled Why AAP Supports the Research Works Act that goes into greater detail as to the reasons to support the bill. Or, rather, all of the myths (their term) around it.

Credit where credit is due:

• Dorothea Salo for her help with the Research Works Act section.
• The members of the Library Society of the World and their vigilance, encouragement, and help sharing and tracking down links and stories for this blog post. Their help is sprinkled throughout this blog post and would not be as robust as it is without their assistance. Many thanks for all their hard work to help this blog post come into being and the team spirit throughout.

As with all complicated systems, blog posts of this length and size are no different. If I made a mistake, missed something, or am wrong, please let me know so I can remedy it. Thanks. -A

Change log:

EDIT: Moved National Academy Press to the honorable mention section of the RWA portion as per feedback from comments. Thanks Monica and Barbara!

EDIT: Removed Springer from the SOPA list since it’s Springer Science + Business Media and not Springer Publishing (the actual SOPA signer). Adjust your maps and lists accordingly. Thanks Heather!

EDIT: Changed JSTOR and Penn State in the RWA section to reflect their stances. Many thanks to Catherine Pellegrino for tracking these announcements!

EDIT: Added Aftermath section with various reactions from library entities as well as AAP changing their press release.