How Does Digitization Affect Scholarship

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How Does Digitization Affect Scholarship?

• Roger C. Schonfeld
• Ithaka
• http//www.ithaka.org/research
• June 1/3, 2007
• NASIG
• Louisville, Kentucky

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What Is the Optimal Model for a Scholarly Journal?

• Print, online, or dual-format?
• Standalone journal title or inclusion in
  publisher-specific bundles or multi-publisher
  aggregations?
• Open access?
• Indexed by general web search engines?
• Commercial or non-profit?
• Sustainability?
• Many other characteristics as well
• How do we even come up with a framework to
  analyze which of these might be best?

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My Presentation Today

• Two-sided markets as the framework
• The author side of the market
• An overview of our study on the impact of
  digitization
• Some preliminary findings from our study
• NO ANSWERS.

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Two-Sided Markets
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Two-Sided Markets

• An economic network having two (or more) distinct
  user groups which need one another
• Characterized by having a platform intermediary
  that balances the interests of the two sides of
  the market
• Credit card networks
• Merchants
• Cardholders
• Video game consoles
• Games
• Players
• Audio/video formats
• Content providers
• Listeners/viewers

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A Scholarly Journal as a Two-Sided Market

• A scholarly journal also has two sides.
• It must attract
• Sufficient articles to motivate scholars to read
  it
• Sufficient scholars to motivate authors to submit
  articles to it
• Quality
• The higher quality the authors, the higher
  quality the readers
• The higher quality the readers, the higher
  quality the authors
• All these characteristics will apply to any
  platform or interface for the exchange of
  scholarly materials, even if the traditional
  journal were remade in some database or
  repository form

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Traditional Pricing Models

• Four parties have traditionally contributed, each
  to a varying degree depending on the journal, to
  its revenues
• On the reader side,
• Library (institutional) subscriptions
• Individual (reader) subscriptions
• On the author side,
• Page charges and other author fees
• Advertising fees
• How to determine their relative distribution?

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A Journals Value on the Demand Side

• How valuable is this platform to a librarian?
• ?
• How valuable is this platform to a reader?
• ?

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A Journals Value on the Supply Side

• How valuable is this platform to an advertiser?
• ?
• How valuable is this platform to an author?
• ?

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What Characteristics Are Important to Authors?
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Journal Characteristics Important to an Author

• When it comes to influencing decisions about
  journals in which to publish an article of yours,
  how important to you is each of the following
  possible characteristics of an academic journal?
• The journal makes its articles freely available
  on the Internet, so there is no cost to purchase
  or to read.
• The journal permits scholars to publish articles
  for free, without paying page or article charges.
• Measures have been taken to ensure the protection
  and safeguarding of the journals content for the
  long term.
• The current issues of the journal are circulated
  widely, and are well read by scholars in your
  field.
• The journal is highly selective only a small
  percentage of submitted articles are published.
• The journal is available to readers not only in
  developed nations, but also in developing
  nations.

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Preferences for Academic Journals, 2006
Percent of faculty who believe that each
characteristic is very important in
influencing the decisions where to publish their
articles
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Authors Seek to Maximize the Impact of their Work

• Authors prefer to submit their articles to
  journals that will maximize the impact of their
  work within their field.
• While there are some disciplinary differences
  between preferences among the six journal
  characteristics, the overall finding is
  consistent.
• How might the effectiveness or impact of a given
  journal have changed in recent years?
• Digitization and online availability
• More widely accessible (big deal and/or open
  access)
• Other characteristics?

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Our Study of the Effects of Digitization and
Online Availability on Impact
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People, Funding, and Timeline

• Researchers
• Mark McCabe, Professor of Economics, Georgia Tech
  Principal Investigator
• Chris Snyder, Professor of Economics, Dartmouth
  Co-Principal Investigator
• Roger Schonfeld, Manager of Research, Ithaka
• Funded by a grant from The Andrew W. Mellon
  Foundation
• Hundreds of publishers, aggregators, and archives
  helped provide us with data
• Data collection is completed, analysis is
  underway, full findings are expected to become
  available by late summer (2007)

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Our Methodology

• Three Disciplines
• History
• Economics
• Biological Sciences
• 100 journals in each discipline, comparing
  journal-year by journal-year
• 50 that were digitized early on
• 50 that were digitized only more recently or not
  at all
• Examine citations TO these journals that appeared
  from 1980 to 2005
• Complete citation databases obtained from ISI,
  all citations to these 300 journals appearing
  anywhere in the ISI index between 1980 and 2005
• Regression analysis using a Poisson process

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Focusing on 100 Economics/Business Titles

• Our dataset
• Average year journals began publishing 1948
• Average year articles were published 1980
• Average year of citation to these articles
  (between 1980 and 2005) 1995
• Average of 37 citations per year to each title
• Journal articles from 1980 were available online
  by 2005 via the following sources
• The journal publishers had 19 economics titles
  online, with a mean online date of 2002.
• Digitizer A had 39 economics title online, with a
  mean online date of 2001.
• Digitizer B had 14 economics titles online, with
  a mean online date of 2003
• Digitizer C had 34 economics titles online, with
  a mean online date of 2002.

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The Long Tail of Citations
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Preliminary Findings The Effect on Backfiles

• Restrict sample to materials published in
  1956-1968
• Digitizing these journal title-years has
  increased inbound citations by approximately
  7-17.
• And the effect grows steadily as the materials
  are available online longer by 2005, inbound
  citations to these digitized journal titles was
  increased by more than 50 and perhaps by as much
  as 200.

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The Effect on Backfiles Channels

• Different channels (ie sources of online
  availability) offer different effects. At the low
  end, being available through one channel
  increases citations by 3-15, while at the high
  end being available through another channel
  increases citation by 8-18
• And in 2005, one channel may actually not have
  increased online effects at all, while another
  did between 11-39 and a third from 13-81.
• Questions
• Are some types of channels more effective than
  others?
• Do more channels yield more impact?
• Is widest availability the key?

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The Effect on Current Issues

• Restrict sample to materials published in
  1995-2005
• There is a strong and significant effect from
  digitization, but the dataset is more complicated
  and requires additional analysis.
• Availability through publisher websites are not
  always the optimal distribution mechanism to
  increase citations.
• At the same time, longer embargo periods clearly
  decrease the ability of a given channel to
  increase citations.

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Further Questions

• How do the disciplines vary one to the other?
• Due to the importance of backfiles, will history
  or biological sciences have greater digitization
  effects on impact?
• Does year of source-item publication matter?
• Will references to older articles increase more
  than references to more recently published
  articles?

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Implications?
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Implications

• Upshot Digitization has clearly had a strong and
  significant positive impact on scholars ability
  to find and cite relevant references. There is
  significant value both to being online and to
  digitizing backfiles, though there are
  significant differences among channels
• Implications for Publishers?
• ?
• Implications for Libraries?
• ?
• Implications for Authors?
• ?
• Implications for Readers?
• ?

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The Effect of Digitization on Scholarship

• Roger C. Schonfeld
• rcs_at_ithaka.org
• 212-500-2338
• http//www.ithaka.org/research