Why is knowledge getting so expensive? | Jeffrey Edmunds | TEDxPSU

Key Concepts

• Ebook Licensing vs. Ownership: The fundamental distinction between purchasing a physical book (ownership) and acquiring a license to access an ebook.
• Copyright Law: The legal framework governing the rights of creators and users of copyrighted material, particularly its implications for digital content.
• Publisher Oligopoly: The concentration of power within a few large publishers in the scholarly publishing market.
• Artificial Inflation of Ebook Costs: Publishers' strategies that lead to higher ebook prices for libraries compared to print books.
• Bundling: Publishers forcing libraries to license large packages of ebooks, including many unwanted titles.
• Intellectual Labor: The unpaid work of scholars, peer reviewers, and editors in creating scholarly content.
• Public Funding of Knowledge Creation: The significant role of tuition, taxpayer dollars, and grants in funding academic research and publications.
• Open Access (OA): Literature that is freely available online and free of most licensing restrictions.
• Open Educational Resources (OER): Freely available and adaptable educational materials, including textbooks.
• Libraries as Pillars of Democracy: The role of libraries in ensuring an informed citizenry through free and equitable access to information.

The Shift from Ownership to Licensing: A Crisis for Libraries

The video highlights a critical shift in how libraries acquire and manage their collections, moving from owning physical books to licensing digital content, primarily ebooks. This transition, driven by the digital age, has profound and unsettling implications for libraries and their ability to serve their communities.

The "Van Scenario": A Metaphor for Ebook Removal

The speaker, Jeff Edmonds from Penn State Libraries, uses a vivid analogy: a van arriving at the library to seize 5,432 books. This scenario, while seemingly like theft, represents the reality of how libraries lose access to licensed ebooks. Unlike physical books, which become the library's permanent property upon purchase, ebooks are acquired through licenses. This means that publishers, who retain ownership, can revoke access to these digital resources, effectively removing them from the library's catalog.

The Illusion of Ebook Purchase

A key argument presented is that consumers, including libraries, do not actually "purchase" ebooks in the traditional sense. US copyright law allows for outright ownership of physical books, enabling resale and full control by the owner. However, for ebooks, publishers have opted not to sell them outright. Instead, when a user clicks "buy," they are acquiring a license to access the text, not ownership of the digital file. This distinction is crucial because it shifts control from the user/library to the publisher.

The Scale of the Problem: Ebooks Dominate Collections

At Penn State Libraries, the majority of the collection is now digital. Out of approximately 10 million items, over 6 million are online ebooks, with fewer than 4 million being physical books. This means that a significant portion of the library's resources are subject to licensing agreements and the risk of removal. Edmonds states that libraries are compelled to remove "thousands, tens of thousands, and some months even hundreds of thousands of eBooks" from their catalogs monthly due to licensing terms.

The Publisher Oligopoly and Its Tactics

The scholarly publishing market is dominated by an oligopoly of five major publishers. This concentration of power allows them to:

• Artificially Inflate Ebook Costs: Ebooks are often more expensive to license than to purchase outright in print.
• Rapidly Increase Costs: The cost of ebooks has risen significantly faster than the rate of inflation over decades.
• Impose Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs): Publishers force libraries to sign contracts that prevent them from discussing pricing with peer institutions. This lack of transparency makes it impossible to determine fair market prices.
• Bundle Content: Libraries are compelled to license vast packages of ebooks, including thousands they neither want nor need, similar to being forced to buy one of every cereal in the store to get a desired one.

The Paradox of Publicly Funded Knowledge

A central critique is the economic absurdity of the current scholarly publishing ecosystem. The intellectual labor involved in creating scholarly content – research, writing, peer review, and editing – is largely performed by academics whose salaries are paid by universities. These universities, in turn, are funded by:

• Tuition Monies: Students' tuition fees contribute to the creation of knowledge.
• Taxpayer Dollars: Public universities like Penn State rely on state funding.
• Grant Monies: A significant portion of research grants have a public funding component.

Despite this substantial public investment in knowledge creation, universities are then forced to license this same knowledge back from publishers at exorbitant costs. Penn State Libraries, for example, spent over $13 million on ebooks and electronic resources in the previous year, a figure deemed unsustainable given higher education's financial challenges.

Towards a Solution: Open Access and Open Educational Resources

The speaker proposes a radical shift in perspective: viewing knowledge not as a private commodity but as a public good, akin to roads, bridges, or clean air. This paradigm shift could lead to several corrective actions:

• Bypassing Publishers: Recognizing that the intellectual labor is done by academics, libraries and universities could potentially reduce their reliance on traditional publishers.
• Open Access (OA) Literature: The example of the linguistics journal Lingua is presented. When its editors were dissatisfied with Elsevier's pricing, they left and founded Glossa, an Open Access journal. OA literature is freely available online without significant licensing restrictions.
• Open Educational Resources (OER): Expanding the concept of OA to textbooks, OERs are freely available and adaptable educational materials. The cost of textbooks has risen dramatically, forcing over half of Penn State students (65%) to forgo purchasing them and nearly a third (31%) to avoid courses due to material costs. The Open Textbook Library at Penn State offers over 1,500 freely available and adaptable textbooks. Professors can modify these texts to suit their courses, a more sustainable model than students paying $75-$150 for books they'll rarely use again.
• Discoverable Free Resources: Libraries are actively identifying and making discoverable over 1.2 million resources that are freely available online, not behind paywalls, and accessible to anyone with internet access, regardless of institutional affiliation.

Conclusion: Libraries as Pillars of Democracy

Jeff Edmonds concludes by emphasizing the vital role of libraries in a democracy. He argues that democracy requires an informed citizenry, and informed citizens need free, equitable, and open access to information and knowledge, especially that which has been collectively funded. Knowledge, he asserts, is a public good and must be treated as such.