Sustainable Academic Publishing

Sustainable has become the buzzword for libraries lately: sustainable buildings, sustainable collections, sustainable instruction. We think about  budgets, the environment, and services. At some level there is an anxiety that libraries can't keep doing things the way we are doing them. There is an equal anxiety that libraries are not doing what we should.

There are four problems that keep activities from being sustainable:₁

• Creating more waste than natural cycles can handle - the "horse manure" problem₂
• Extracting more materials from the earth than natural cycles can handle - the "heavy metal poisoning" problem
• Using resources faster than they can be generated - the "clear cut" problem
• Inhibiting people from accessing basic needs - the "everyone wants to eat" problem

Sustainable academic publishing would addressed all these problems. Right now, in my opinion the biggest problem keeping academic publish from being sustainable is "every one wants to eat". Academic publishing requires a distinct set of services: creation, peer-review, copy editing, distribution and preservation. At each step of the way, the people providing these services need to be able to meet needs. The scholars, excepting those with non-academic day jobs or large estates, want paid academic positions as either teachers or researchers. Publishers coordinating peer-review, copy editing, and distribution have a host of employees and owners, unless heavily subsidized, need to at least meet costs and possibly turn a profit for the owners. Librarians coordinating distribution and preservation want to live free from poverty and have time to spend with their families.

None of the models - not open green, not open gold, not membership, not traditional publishing, address preserving meaningful work and ensuring all the people in the value stream have the means to support themselves. One possible solution would be to change publishing business models back to individual subscriptions only. Libraries would have the responsibility to archive materials. This would function as a de facto embargo - materials wouldn't be freely available until they were sold to libraries for archive purposes. It's not a great solution, but it is workable, given agreement between all of the players.

¹Sustainability Illustrated, 4 Root Causes of Unsustainability, accessed 16 January 2015
²Horses were a real pollution problem in 19th Century Cities. For example, see: When Horses Posed a Public Health Hazard, City Room Blogging from the Five Boroughs, New York Times, 9 June 2008, accessed 19 January 2015