Episode 4: Cloudsource Open Access with Carolyn Morris and Rick Branham
In this episode we talk all things open access with Carolyn Morris and Rick Branham from SirsiDynix about their new Cloudsource OA product.
Visit the CloudsourceOA site to learn more and sign up for an upcoming webinar:
https://www.cloudsourceoa.com/
Episode 4: Cloudsource OA Transcript
Heather:
Hello, and welcome to the Common Stacks podcast. Common Stacks is a podcast that brings together professionals from within the library world, as well as interesting experts from other professions to engage in discussions around the issues affecting libraries and looking at the ways in which libraries are dispelling the myth of, "this is how it's always been done."
I am your host, Heather Teysko. Open Access, like many new developments and technologies, is a double edged sword. On one hand, this new model where information is freely available to users in scholarly journals, and online, is an amazing development for patrons and students. On the other hand, it's presenting some clear challenges in how libraries can present and catalog the information, making it easy for patrons to find. That's where product like Cloudsource Open Access comes in. And today I'm chatting with Carolyn Morris and Rick Branham from SirsiDynix about their new product, and how it helps to solve the problem of metadata and presenting open access materials to patrons. I'm excited to dive deep into the Open Access, model and how Cloudsource Open Access can help. At the heart of this conversation though, is the idea around equity, and while open access materials themselves are free to users, trolling through all of the places where you can find them, finding the right articles, can be cumbersome and difficult. So Cloudsource OA really tries to identify and solve this equity issue. So we're going to hop right in with Carolyn and Rick explaining where the open access business model is right now.
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Carolyn Morris, Director of Content Solutions at SirsiDynix, and Rick Branham Vice President of Content Solutions - for somebody who's kind of just trying to wrap their head around open access, I know if you blinked, it's all changed, right? So if you're just kind of starting to get your head around it, explain to me business models behind open access, and then what is open access? I hear open access, and that means free to me. And so what is it?
Carolyn:
That's a great question too. I think one of the things that's changed is that when we first started talking about open access, a lot of the conversation was about how libraries could encourage faculty members to publish with an open access license. And the idea was, yes, we are publishing this stuff online. We don't have to print it. We don't have to bind it. We don't have to ship it. We can start doing this in a way that's more sustainable for libraries. And of course, libraries have seen their budgets either stay flat or shrink as the price of journals in particular, but also subscription databases and books have continued to increase. So it was in some sense driven by that need to find a different model that was going to work to continue to support libraries, and the work that they do.
Carolyn:
So I think that was a big piece of it. And for years and years, it was not about how are we going to get this content and include it in our collections, but how are we going to get people to produce it? And what's really changed over the last decade for sure, and really accelerated over the last five years is, of funders who fund for research. So these are people like the National Institutes of Health in Canada, too. A lot of the government agencies require open access publishing, and Europe is the biggest leader - the European Commission has something that requires almost every academic researcher in Europe to publish their works with an open access license. And it gets increasingly stringent as time goes on. So requiring that not only do they publish open access, but they do so immediately and they do so in a journal that's all OA. And so these movements have really led to this acceleration and open access publishing. So now that we can look at recent years and see more than half of peer reviewed scholarly articles coming out with an open access license, which is really a stunning change. So that's now just starting to lead to conversations about, "Do we need to keep subscribing to all this stuff in of more than half of it is open access?"
Heather:
Right? So then this is kind of, this is a, a new venture for Sirsi, isn't it with having a content product. Can you tell me how that came about?
Rick:
Yeah, so we actually started back in about 2015 with building out a content platform, but given SirsiDynix's strength in the public library market, we actually have probably an equally strong presence in the academic market, but we're known for the work we've done with publics, and public library consortia. So we started building our content platform, and we actually tackled the most difficult kind of content first. And it's the e-resources that have digital rights management, DRMS associated with them. So eBooks, audiobooks, videos, all of that sort of content - we built cloud-based repository, if you will, of metadata that we could use in discovery, it's called E-resource Central. I guess our thinking was, "Let's get the most popular stuff in." And those were those formats and it, it appealed to public libraries, of course. So that's where we started and we now have all of the industry's most popular digital collections regularly syncing up with our cloud platform called E-resource Central.
Rick:
So our next phase was to tackle the more dynamic and certainly a more vast repository of electronic resources. And that came with a whole new set of challenges in terms of scale. And the fact that the articles are so dynamic in terms of how much is produced daily, that it had some challenges associated with keeping up with it. So Cloudsource is really kind of phase two of our resources initiative that began in 2015. And the timing was right with the advent of OA, it was a good place for us to start building our article index, as that stuff had fewer limitations regarding authentication, and things of that nature, there were free and open licenses. So we started building out the article platform with OA, and we're now pivoting to including all scholarly content, even those that are closed access. And that's called Cloudsource Plus.
Heather:
What have been some of the issues that libraries have seen with OA with the growth of open publishing, open access? How have libraries has been able to adapt to that? What have been some of their challenges?
Carolyn:
Right now the biggest challenge is there's not a lot of information out there for libraries. It's not easy to know what's open access and what isn't, and how to get it all. So libraries have had some really great nonprofit resources out there and available to the them like Directory of Open Access Journals. That's given them like, "oh, here's a tool I can go, I can turn this on easily in discovery systems and get access to open access content." But the thing is, that's only tracking the open access content that's in an all open access journal. So what we know is more than 80% of open access articles coming out today are actually being published in what we would call a hybrid journal. So they're being published right within the traditional journal products like Springer Nature, because the authors want to still publish in the premier journal for their discipline. They still worry about promotion and tenure.
So even though they're very happy to have their content be open and make it really easily available, it is still going into these traditional journal products. And that makes discovery a real challenge. This stuff scattered over a hundred sites. It's not really even easy to know where to find it, and how much there is and what the quality of it is, so that it's very opaque environment today, I think for many librarians. So that seems to be step one. But there was IMLS research done not too long ago, just before the pandemic that really indicated that even at large libraries, ATLs, that many of the librarians interviewed for the research said they did not feel confident in their knowledge of open access.
Rick:
I'd add to that too. That there's been a real challenge with libraries learning to trust OA content, learning that it's good content. I think for many people in kneejerk reaction is, "oh, if it's free, it can't be any good." And when I first heard of OA articles, I thought it was more to eBooks, which I'm familiar with, and I've downloaded some really terrible eBooks that are free on Amazon. So you just think, "oh, it's free. It's gotta be bad." But I think most people don't understand that the authors are still getting paid. It's just the funding model shifted a little bit, but it's still same authors publishing in the same high impact journals. It's just that they're now being produced with a different funding model, but it's the same content. So people still are trying to wrap their heads around that and learn to trust that the OA content is good.
Heather:
Sure. And yeah, we've seen that with the eBooks 10, 12 years ago, if it was self-published or something, it was like, "oh, that's gotta be horrible," and now there's a lot of great stuff out there that's self-published and a lot of authors want to go that route anyway, because they get more money from it or they're able to have more control over their work too.
Rick:
I think the perception in general is, is changing toward self-publishing and different funding models. And that's, that's awakening people to the OA movement, but like Carolyn said, it's also selling faculty on the fact that they can trust this OA content, because I think a lot of faculty get a, it locked in their heads that, "Hey, I use these databases. I trust them. I know them." And when you talk about, you know, adding a new resource or maybe pulling back on some of those traditional databases, faculty kind of freak out, so there's that situation to deal with as well.
Heather:
How do you get over the idea, like you just hinted at it, with it's free. So why should a library pay for a product if it's free. How do you get over that hurdle?
Rick:
I think maybe a knee-jerk reaction before they find out about what Cloudsource is, but Cloudsource is not a database. It is a platform and really what a library is paying for - and I should say it's at a price point that's a small percentage of what they would pay for a database. They're really just paying for us to build the platform, aggregate the data, enhance the metadata, provide collection management tools so they can curate their own collections, provide COUNTER usage, statistics, provide the discovery platform, the mobile interface, all that is actually what constitutes the paid service around this activity of aggregating the OA content. So we're not charging a per use resource per journal. There's just a flat fee based on the size of the institution. And then, like I said, it really is a small percentage compared to what they pay for your traditional databases.
Heather:
I see you nodding Carolyn, did you want to -
Carolyn:
Yeah, no, I think that's really true that most libraries just don't have the staff in order to be able to do all of this, but also what we've seen working as closely as we have for the last two years to really build those out is that the metadata is frequently sparse. And so being able to pull together all the metadata and manage that and normalize it so that it's actually useful. And you can actually discover this content is a really big job. And that's even just looking at the article metadata, as soon as you start to look at other really valuable sources of open access content. So open access eBooks, for example, that metadata is even worse. It's less standard. There are fewer actual really unique identifiers to go with it. And it's a challenge. So it would be a challenge for any one library to pick up and do that. So we just wanna be giving you, you this software solution that lets you take advantage of the content that's out there.
Heather:
It's a discovery platform. It could also be used for collection development then no?
Carolyn:
Yes. We give the library, the options both at big parameter levels. So you could say, I don't wanna see preprints. That stuff has not been peer reviewed. That's not appropriate for my population. Or you could say we want the most cutting edge re edge research. Of course we wanna see the preprints that's the newest stuff coming out. So we want to see it. So libraries are going to have different opinions about which open access they want to show. And we want to give them the tools to be able to make that - we also have libraries that have said, "we spend a lot of time teaching about copyright and we don't want to show anything that doesn't actually have a license attached to it." So there's a lot of open access today that we sometimes call bronze open access, and the publisher has made the article free to it on their website, but they have been silent about the copyright.
Carolyn:
And we've had libraries say, "that's actually not okay with us. We know it's probably it's legal if Elsevier posted it on their site for us to provide access to our students this way to it. But that's goes against everything we're trying to teach them about copyrights. So we would rather not show it and have a smaller collection." Libraries are going to make very different decisions about that. We've also had librarians that just said, "you know, we just only want to see English, or we only want to see Spanish, or we only want to see journals that are indexed by scope." And we give libraries the tools to be able to do that, as well as to be able to say, for instance, we have a special library in Europe that deals with taxation law, and that's all they want to show, is journals that are related to taxation, and we are able to let them do that. So if that is, we don't know anybody else in the marketplace that's offering that kind of functionality around open access today.
Heather:
Interesting. So it's a, it could almost be like an open access - like, if you didn't have a collection development policy around open access already, you could kind of use these tools to, to create one, I guess.
Carolyn:
You could, and to see what it, what the result that would be hard to do. You could say, "here's our collection development policy," and say, "these are all the things we like or dislike." But then knowing how many items would fall into that bucket is hard to do right now. But the tools that we provide through Cloudsource make that really easily visible to people.
Heather:
And Rick, you were going to hop in there.
Rick:
Yeah. I was just going to elaborate on the discovery component, because that is a big part of it. And SirsiDynix, our long tradition, you know, 30 plus years is in building software with a heavy focus on the user experience. So we're coming at this from a whole different perspective than the traditional discovery providers. If you think of the traditional discovery providers, they're also content providers, that's their cash cow. So discovery is based upon promoting the content and protecting the licensing, right? So that's where really all the current mechanisms are around authentication and link resolvers come in by approaching this from a software user experience perspective, particularly when we're dealing with OA content, we can really focus on the end user. We want to make this so attractive to students that they would much rather go to Cloudsource than to Google Scholar.
Rick:
You know, Google Scholar is not going to give you a way to limit to OA stuff, limit to things that have full text. In fact, you're gonna have to wade through hit after hit page after page to find something that will take you to the full text. And that's after many, many clicks to get there. Students don't underestimate their desire to jump through a gazillion hoops just to not have to log into something then to get protect. So we're presenting an easy discovery environment, really great search algorithms and relevance, super easy user interface. And every single thing they click on, they're going to get full text without having to log in. So it's just a, that that really, I think is probably the key value that we're offering.
Carolyn:
One of the things we would hear from librarians is we don't like open access because the links are broken and that's something we have ways of checking and making sure, and we do it daily in our big index. And then at the time of search, when somebody executes a search to make sure that they're not going to have one of those broken links, and I won't say it never happens, but it is super rare. That is, again, a perception that's been out there about open access
Heather:
And you guys have had a number of trials going on with various consortia and pilot projects and things. How has that gone? What's the feedback been?
Rick:
We actually completed our Cloudsource pilot program. It was the most successful SirsiDynix has had in its history. We pulled together at the end 42 institutions that represent more than 400 libraries. I'd say two thirds of them were academic, but a third were public, as well as special. And we compleated the pilot on time in December last year. And so now the product is in GA. And we are about to launch our Cloudsource Plus pilot this quarter. And again, that, that is the expansion of the index to expose non OA resources along with all the tools like your link resolver, hub finder included with that package.
Heather:
Did you get a lot of good feedback? What, what is it done in terms of like the product roadmap?
Carolyn:
Libraries were really surprised at how well it was received. I think especially public libraries, which was something we weren't sure how it was going to go. And they have seen a lot of use. We get notes like, "oh, I was watching this class, and the professor referred to this article or this research, and I was able to go to Cloudsource and find that, and easily." And that speaks to the underlying metadata enhancement. That makes for a really great search experience. But also just the wonder that happens when people realize that all of this content's available for free, and it's recent, and it's high quality, and they can find something that they're looking for, that we haven't had a lot of change in our roadmap in terms product development. And mostly because they wanted to just do what their regular databases do might be easier. And it is because we don't have to redo, go through all those authentication hoops. There's so much we can do with this open content because of that. And we're not, you know, it's not like we're hosting the content or, or anything like that. It's just that being able to provide that rich metadata makes a huge difference.
Heather:
What is next? So you're rolling out Cloudsource Plus - what's next in the plan?
Carolyn:
So if you think about where we've been with eBooks, which is pretty interesting used to be, you bought huge, huge packages from Netlibrary, way back in Amigos really broke the dam on ebook purchasing, and everybody bought huge packages, and that's what you got. And then now, fast forward two decades, sadly. What we've got is, "oh, we only buy eBooks when somebody uses them." So we have moved into this demand driven acquisition business model for buying eBooks today. Many, many eBooks are bought that way and libraries working in that, that fashion. We think that we can go the same direction with articles, so that for most libraries certainly for the smaller to mid-size academics, being able to say, "here are 40 million open access items from the best journals in the world. And this can serve as our multidisciplinary database and serve most of the needs of our patrons."
Carolyn:
But if they're looking for something specific, maybe it's something we've subscribed to strategically, Harvard Business Review, is never going open access. Go ahead, save your money on your multidisciplinary data, move that money to Harvard Business Review, and be able to provide the open access for the bulk of your stuff. And then these really specialized super resources for your subscription money. And then if somebody needs a specific article between copyright clearance centers, get it now, or reprint desk, you could provide that on demand, either paying for the patron mediated or unmediated, and where it hooked into all of that. So a library could say, "here is the universe." Most people are going be just very happy to go for the open access content, because we know it is high quality. It is current, but in the case where they need something specific that, or they can't get their needs met with open access, having that ability just to buy one by one initial research seems to indicate that that is a more affordable approach.
Carolyn:
So I think SUNY did some research when they canceled their Wiley big deal, their ILL cost did not go up. And they didn't get a lot of patron feedback. Similarly, University of California turned off Elsevier. They had faculty buy-in for that. But again, they didn't see this huge eruption of ILL expenses because of it. And part of that is because the best research is being published, open access because it's funded by people who are requiring those authors to publish open access. So it just kind of goes around in this virtuous cycle, I think.
Rick:
And I think what Carolyn described with the on demand purchasing really constitutes a kind of a safety net for library. So, you know, being making good business decisions would mean looking at databases that have such a high OA percentage, yet continue to raise their prices year after year. And we would give them the metrics to help them make those informed decisions, but still have a safety net in terms of buy it now. Or let's not forget ILL loan and doc delivery. And our system out of the box supports a robust connection to, to a really whatever ILL system a library may be using. And even with that, like Carolyn said, the, that the evidence seems to say that ILL transactions didn't go up even when they pulled these big Elsevier databases. So people are still finding what they need and, and maybe it has a lot to do with user or behavior too. If you think of particularly undergraduates, often they're starting with a topic and doing a search with the goal of finding good, full text resources for their topic. I think many undergrads, especially aren't saying here's a list of exact resources that I need or here's journals I need to look at or here's databases. They just want good quality full text. And that's where we're seeing this OA collection we think is more than up to the challenge to fit those needs.
Carolyn:
The only other piece that we sometimes talk about or try to remember to talk about is that this is the open access movement is part of the United Nations sustainability goals for 2030, and it is about equity and access. And so where libraries can really play a role in that all of this is free freely available on the open web, but for many people finding and vetting and truly vetting understanding whether this is true, good science or not, is very difficult and libraries really have a role to play in their core strengths, which are curation. Here is an unbelievable opportunity to use those skills, to create collections, to make things more discoverable and provide more equity than we've ever had before. So that, you know, I was a, I was a high school debater. That's how geeky I always was. And we, we competed against kids from Lexington, Massachusetts who had they had access to the Harvard University libraries. And, you know, like we were using little Foxborough Public Library.
Our resources were but if that's like a real, it's, it's a microcosm, but it's true, right? That, that access to high quality information resources in the end equals equals economic resources for people and making sure that we're not only producing things open access, but making there's equal access to it. People can find it and that they know it's real. We know, we know what's going out there with misinformation today. So libraries helping patrons figure out that this is real quality research versus not, is a huge value that goes beyond just being able to pay for something.
Rick:
And the pandemic really kind of brought to light, or exposed, that need for even public libraries to deliver this kinds of timely research to their end users. Because again, they're trying to battle this information and it's hard to do that with just books, you know, who have a longer publishing cycle and aren't going to be as current. So having these article resources to provide this timely information to a public that needs it and increasingly wants it. I think that is, is such a powerful bolster to the library's mission in general.
Heather:
Interesting. Interesting. I have learned a lot. I thank you for your time. Oh, I should ask you where can people learn more? I mean, I'll put links in the show notes and stuff that we do for these too. But if someone is just listening to this, where can they go to learn more?
Rick:
Go to CloudsourceOA.com, and you'll find a trove of resources, a link to, I think, the most important thing on that page is a link to the events. We do weekly deep dive demos of this and you can sign up for it on that website, but we'd love for people able to come check us out and find out more. And yeah. Thanks for being such a good host Heather and doing your research and asking good questions.
Heather:
Thanks so much to Carolyn and Rick for stopping by the podcast and chatting with us about Cloudsource Open Access. You, you can get more information in the show notes at Commonsstacks.com. You'll find links to our social platforms where you can meet and engage with other forward thinking library professionals around the country and continue these conversations that will move libraries forward. All right, thanks so much for listening and we'll be back next week.