Draft: Subject to Senate Approval

THE THREE HUNDRED FIFTH PLENARY SESSION

OF THE UNIVERSITY FACULTY SENATE

OF THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK

May 18, 2004

The meeting was called to order by UFS Chair O’Malley at 6:30 p.m. in Room 9204/5 at the Graduate School and University Center. 74 voting members were present:

Baruch: Present – Hill and Pollard. Absent – Freedman, Giannikos, Majete, Myers, Onochie, and Wiley. BMCC: Present – Agwu, Friedman, Price, and White. Absent - Belknap and Martin. Bronx CC: Present – Fergenson. Absent - Lopez-Marron, McManus, and Skinner. Brooklyn: Present – Bell, Bloomfield, Cunningham, Jacobson, Morawski, Romer, Shapiro, and Viscusi. Absent – Antoniello, Tobey, and Wills. CCNY: Present – Connorton, Crain, Sank, and Sohmer. Absent – Benenson, Broderick, and Buffenstein. Vacancies – 3. CSI: Present – Cooper, Klibaner, Levine, Yousef, and Alternate Monte. Absent – Farkouh, Kaser, and Petratos. CUNY Law School: Present – McArdle. Absent – Andrews. Vacancy – 1. Graduate School: Present – Baumrin, Lerner, Tobin, and Alternate Long. Absent – Khuri, Nolan, and Rachlin. Hostos CC: Present – August, Singh, and Alternate Czarnocha. Absent - Roe. Vacancies - 1. Hunter: Present – Doyle, Finder, Friedman, and Matthews. Absent - Guzzetta, Kaye, Krishnamachari, Sherrill, and Wimberly. Vacancies – 1. John Jay: Present – Brugnola, Kaplowitz and Stevens. Absent – Kubic, Mandery, and Wylie-Marques. Kingsborough CC: Present – Barnhart, Farrell, Galvin, O’Malley, and Ruoff. Absent – none. LaGuardia CC: Present – Beaky, Davidson, Mettler, Rushing, and Alternate Green-Anderson. Absent - Lerman. Vacant - 1. Lehman: Present – Mineka, Philipp, Wilder, and Alternate Kolb. Absent – Aronowitz, Josay, and Jervis. Medgar Evers: Present – Hastick, Patwary, and Alternates Daly and Stewart. Absent - Barker and Donohue. NYCCT: Present – Cermele, Dreyer, Horelick, Hounion, and Walter. Absent - Richardson. Queens: Present – Casco, Erickson, Moore, and Savage. Absent – Bird, Brody, Habib, Sukhu, and Tse. Vacancies – 1. Queensborough CC: Present – Barbanel, Hest, Pecorino, and Alternates Ansani and Tully. Absent – Weiss. Vacancies – 1. York: Present – Lewis and Alternate Cooley. Absent – Moss and Wolosin. Vacancies - 1.

Governance Leaders present: Baumrin (GSUC), Cooper (CSI), Dreyer (NYCCT), Fridman (Kingborough), Friedheim (BMCC), Kaplowitz (John Jay), Kuhn-Osius (Hunter), Levine (CSI), Mettler (LaGuardia), and Savage (Queens). Parliamentarian Andrea McArdle, Executive Director Phipps, Administrative Assistant Pasela, and Secretary Blanchard were present. 

I. Approval of the Agenda - The agenda was adopted as proposed.

II. Approval of the Minutes of April 20, 2004 - The minutes were adopted as proposed.

III. Reports : (Recorded in Reports & Deliberations)

A. Chair

B. Chancellor Goldstein

          C. Representatives to Board Committees

IV. Additional Nominations for Officers and Members-at-Large of the Executive Committee - Professor Sally Mettler (English, LaGuardia), chair of the Elections Committee, asked for additional nominations for each category, but there were none.

Professor Sohmer stated that he wished to withdraw his name for an at-large position because he expected to retire.

The only contested election was for Chair. After statements by Professors Crain and O’Malley (recorded in Reports & Deliberations), a ballot was taken, resulting in a vote of 17 for Professor Crain and 55 for Professor O’Malley, who was thus re-elected for a second and final term.

The other, uncontested positions were elected by unanimously directing the Secretary to cast one ballot for each; no statements were made.

V. New Business : (Recorded in Reports & Deliberations)

A. Discussion of Open Access - Invited Guest, Martin Blume, American Physical Society

There being no further business, the meeting was adjourned at 8:35 P.M.

Respectfully submitted,

William Phipps

Executive Director

THE THREE HUNDRED AND FIFTH PLENARY SESSION

OF THE UNIVERSITY FACULTY SENATE

OF THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK

May 18, 2004

III. Reports:

B. Chancellor Matthew Goldstein: Chair O’Malley - For those of you who are just joining us for the first time tonight, the new Senators, one of the traditions is that the Chancellor speaks to us at the beginning of every meeting, and then we bombard him with questions. So here is the Chancellor, Matthew Goldstein.

Chancellor Goldstein –I know that you have important business tonight, so I will be brief. On the budget nothing is happening, it’s all about CFE, Campaign for Fiscal Equity, that has really paralyzed the entire processes of government at the state level. You’ve been reading about it and what you’ve been reading is an accurate portrayal. Eventually it’s going to have to break. The thing that I think all of us ought to be very concerned about is that, however the financial arrangements are decided, there will be significant spill-over for next fiscal year, which means that there is going to be further competition for limited resources. And we ought to be mindful that after November of 2004 there will be a newly elected Senate and a newly elected Assembly, and they are going to be faced with rather significant financial challenges, so I’m looking out further rather than just to the next year. The next year, with the Governor’s budget, which is not a good budget overall but at least it gives us stability, and we will have enhancements to that budget. We’ve been working very diligently with the Senate and the Assembly and I think we’ve come to some closure, although the budget bills have certainly not been passes at this point. I’m somewhat optimistic that we not only will have stability but we may even have some ability to invest in the core business of the University, which I think is very important. That also reflects on the capital side of the budget. Obviously, if Albany is not moving forward there is clearly a paralysis at the City level, because in order for the Mayor and the City Council then to vote upon a budget they have to understand what kind of revenue they’re going to get from the State, and without a budget of course that is unknown. I will tell you that in the City Council’s preliminary response to the Mayor’s preliminary budget – both of them are preliminary because they haven’t been finished yet – there were significant additions to the Mayor’s budget, specifically on the capital side for the community colleges, which is a very strong and powerful signal for us, and there is very strong sentiment at the Council level to restore many of the cuts that were presented in the Mayor’s budget: the Vallone Scholarships first and foremost, the Safety Net program, and a number of other small items that are directly related to a particular campus. So that’s where we are on the State Budget.

At the Board meeting this coming Monday I anticipate bringing, I don’t see any reason that this will not happen at this point, three Presidents: the President of John Jay, the President of Kingsborough Community College, and the President of New York City College of Technology. We will also bring forward an acting Vice Chancellor for Academic Administration and Planning, and in June there will be other very senior level appointments as well. There are eight very senior level searches that are in various stages of completion now, beyond the Presidents that I just announced; the search for President of Baruch College hopefully will be finished, and I anticipate that that will happen as well in June; I anticipate that we will bring an Executive Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs, that committee is working on a very fast track, a Budget Director, a Chief Librarian, and in the fall we will start a search for the new Chief Executive for the Graduate School and University Center. So there are an awful lot of positions, and obviously each of those, with the exception of one, I am very much involved in and in various stages of negotiation with various people. We will also bring the Master Plan to the Board and the establishment of the new Graduate School of Journalism. All of that will happen in May, a week from yesterday. Beyond that, and you know that for four years now I’ve been talking about the need for the University to take a big leap with respect to raising private resources, we will be announcing very soon some very major gifts that will really cause tremendous attention. We haven’t seen gifts at this level in the University I would say ever, maybe one at Baruch a few years ago, but levels of really quite significant giving. And I think I mentioned this to this body several months ago, we have a committee of Presidents that are working with some consultants, and I’m pushing this process as forcefully as I can, and in the fall we will announce a very aggressive campaign that I think will get a lot of attention. I anticipate that by that announcement we probably will have booked in gifts to the University going back to 2001 close to half a billion dollars. There are lots or rumors what the number is and so forth, and it’s going to be a very aggressive number. I think it’s critically important, and that’s why we’re pushing on this so forcefully. This University just needs the money for investment, largely in research, if we want to continue the movement towards building a University that is able to respond to the challenges that faculties that are now coming in to the University to join colleagues in moving their research agenda, so we are very focused on that. Those are some of the major events that I am involved in. I don’t want to take much time; I know you have a very lengthy agenda. If any of you have a few questions I’ll be glad to take those questions. I’ll get out of here and let you go on to the business that you need to.

Professor Cooper (History, College of Staten Island) – With regard to this campaign for gifts, I have two questions. One, are you counting money given to each individual college by the efforts of the campus fundraisers and Presidents in this total figure or is this money to the central University. And two, are gifts given by wealthy people with conditions? Is there any way for a faculty committee to review the potential conditions that might come with any gifts? / Chancellor Goldstein – Let me answer the first part of your questions and then I’ll take the second part. Regarding the campaign – and I don’t want to announce this now because we’re not ready yet, but there are case statements, feasibility statements, there’s a tremendous amount of work that needs to be finished, and I’m just pushing on this very forcefully – whatever the goal for the University is going to be it is going to result from the aggregation of individual campaigns at each of the individual colleges; so, for example, if Baruch announces a campaign of a quarter of a billion dollars and Hunter of a hundred million and so forth, we will add up all of those. The central administration has raised a fair amount of money as well; for the Honors College alone the number is now hovering above $20 million in the last two and a half years. So it is money largely directed at the campuses and a system campaign is the bundling of each of those mini campaigns. The real challenge that we have now, which the faculty at these campuses has to be very intimately and forcefully involved in, is the development of the case for the campaign at each of your campuses. The case for the campaign is why do we need the money? What are we going to use the money for? There is probably a communality of maybe 85%, perhaps 90% across this University, about the way that we would use the money. Scholarship money, investment of research, laboratory equipment, endowed professorships. There is a series of areas that will be common to all of the campuses, and there will be textual differences among the campuses because they are different. So that’s how the campaign is evolving. So in answer to the first part, the overall amount of money is all of the money coming from the campuses. We will not, nor should any university, accept a gift that compromises the values that we have or compromises us to do something that we shouldn’t do, and we have returned, I have personally intervened, where we have returned a gift we decided not to take because there were covenants associated with it that I thought would compromise the University, and that really just needs to be policy in general. Universities should not do this. A company may come in and say we’ll give you this money if you do such and such, and you don’t want to do such and such in order to take the money. Will there be faculty? There has to be; the faculty has to be very much involved on the task. When I was at Baruch I often took faculty with me in talking to a particular donor because the dollars were directed to what that individual was doing on the campus, the students that they were working with and so forth. So yes, we cannot do this campaign unless the faculty are very much involved. When I come out and actually do the public pronouncement of this all of this will be discussed about how the various constituencies will work together, but we need to have a big leap before we agree to raise that kind of money. And I’m constantly adjusting the target, because with some of these big gifts that we’ve lately been receiving it’s an indication that this University has the capacity to really do some significant work. I hope that answers your question.

Professor Levine (Engineering Science and Physics, College of Staten Island) – Could you please describe the responsibilities of the new, is it Vice Chancellor for Academic Administration and Planning? / Chancellor – Yes, a working title, and this is an acting position, and at the appropriate time we certainly will do a formal search. Three stages, in my mind, have to be followed when you develop and execute policy. You start with a view of what you want to do and what you think you’re capable of doing, the so called vision of moving forward, and I think everything has to start with some core values and then build a vision on those core values. The second is execution; unless you have a management team in place to execute the vision it’s not going to happen. The third is where most institutions, universities, and companies as well sputter, and that is the management of the longevity of the procedures that you’ve put in place. It’s very easy to start backsliding, and what we need, I believe, in academic affairs at this point in the development of the execution of so many of the policies that we have enacted, are really strong data sets, systems, and assessment instruments, and then planning on all of what it is that we heard to continue to move forward. We have really not developed that structure at this University because we’ve been largely in the execution stage. I think at this particular point it might be a good point to pause a little on execution and management and develop those structures so that there is no backsliding. And we need to have early warning systems, we need to have the data, we need to have the actual systems built to do that, and that’s what I envisage this individual bringing to Academic Affairs. That’s going to be his or her portfolio, whoever that person eventually is.

Professor Philipp (Chemistry, Lehman College) – I was going to ask you whether the anticipated State Capital Budget is enough to fund what is in the Master Plan, but I won’t ask that, I’ll ask a different question. / Chancellor – The answer to the first is no, but what the Master Plan does is give you a set of options to start investing. / Professor Philipp – So I’ll go to my other question, which is I think just as important. When the overall University capital drive gets in process, will the University Faculty Senate have a part in it, not statutory, but will we be part and parcel process? / Chancellor – Manfred, I hope so. You’ve asked me that question before, and I’m certainly going to need your assistance on how we move ahead. / Professor Philipp – OK, thank you.

Professor Cermele (New York City College of Technology) – Chancellor, I’m sure you’re aware of the serious situation at City Tech regarding the removal of a department Chair. Many of us in the college community are troubled by this action, since it was motivated by curricular disagreement, which it seems violates the spirit, if not the letter, of the Bylaws. Moreover, there is a concern that the removal of the only African-American full professor on the college P&B might give the appearance of racism. In the past you’ve intervened on campus to remedy problematic situations and we believe this situation on our campus merits your intervention. So I’m asking you, would you consider doing investigation of this matter, and perhaps give us some satisfactory resolution? / Chancellor – Let me respond to the first part of your question. Am I aware? Yes, I am aware. Am I fully informed? I’m not fully informed of the circumstances in which the President took that action. Since this has engendered a lot of interest, not only on the campus but elsewhere, I have instructed some of my staff to ask for the reasons that the action was taken, the procedures that were followed, and we’re going through a review and we’ll see where that review leads. If we find that the review leads us to the conclusion of breaches in procedures, then obviously we will take some action, but I need to find out what the circumstances are. / Professor Cermele – Good, that was the request. Thank you.

Professor Crain (Psychology, City College) – The Hostos Faculty Senate and the UFS have recommended that charges be dropped against Miguel Malo. I’d ask you to look into the possibility of your recommending to the District Attorney that they be dropped, since there’s a lot of controversy over the issues, but the fact is he was arrested holding up a sign in a public place, and given our concerns about the First Amendment these days I think it would be good for the leader of the University to recommend the charges be dropped. / Chancellor – Thank you. We’re certainly looking into that case. Anything else? Well, have a good summer! Is there a plenary in June? / Chair O’Malley – Only if there are emergencies. If you create a situation, yes. Thank you so much.

A. Chair: Chair O’Malley –We have a long agenda tonight. Our invited guest, Martin Blume, is already here. For a good number of people tonight is their first meeting, and I would like to introduce the new members; just say your name so we get to see who you are. I’m going to say the college’s name and if there’s anyone new, just stand up and say hello.

I have to share with you something extremely sad. This morning, John Lin, who is a Senator from Kingsborough, an old friend in the counseling faculty, died. He had had cancer many years ago, but he died suddenly today. I worked with him for years in governance and in the Union, and I could always count on John to give a good fight to President McClenney. Honesty was one of his specialties for which I will always remember him. Could we please have a moment of silence.

I put the Chair’s report in writing so it wouldn’t take as much time. I hope you picked it up. It’s the Chair’s Report May 18^th with a lot of bullets. The Chancellor covered some of them. For the search for the replacement of Louise Mirrer the pool of candidates could be stronger. If you’ve got ideas of people who might fill these positions, they need to be well-published, fine scholars, and have had experience at a Dean or Provost or Vice-President level, please forward them to the UFS office. The UFS has suggested a number of people and given them to Korn Ferry, the search outfit, but we could certainly use more. / Unidentified – Can you tell us who they are? / Chair O’Malley – I’m not at liberty to say. I could say Sandi Cooper has been nominated; she’s in the pool. / Professor Cooper – This is by way of humor. / Chair O’Malley – No, it’s not, Sandi. / Professor Cooper – It wasn’t my idea.

Chair O’Malley – The Academic Integrity Report is finally going to be voted on by the Board. There are still some changes being made. Al Levine is working on it right now, going over it. Martha, do you have any questions? / Professor Bell – I’d like to know if they moved the Board’s Student Affairs Committee meeting. / Chair O’Malley – They are looking into it. They are trying to make me an alternate for that day. I think it’s illegal.

Moving on, the Faculty Experience Survey piloted by Dean Savage at Queens will be ready in the fall. It will be done by an independent survey organization that will send it out, get it back, and then compile the data and put it together. We will own the data, it will be shared with the Chancellor, and it will become part of the performance measures in the evaluation of Presidents. The survey will be conducted every two years. I think this is a victory, we will see.

On the Master Plan almost all the changes have been incorporated. It’s a much better document; it still has a long way to go, but it is a better document. It will go through the Board in May. / Unidentified – Can we see the document? / Chair O’Malley – The latest draft is on the website, although Louise Mirrer said yesterday at the Board hearing that she will still take more suggestions. Several excellent suggestions were made at the hearing that she said she would take into consideration. I did ask the Chancellor at your request to postpone it for a month so that we could look at it more fully and his answer was no.

The Academic Freedom Policy Resolution passed by the UFS in April will be introduced in CAPPR either on the agenda or as an added item. It’s been quite an interesting saga. As a result of our resolution, the University discovered it has no Academic Freedom Policy on the CUNY website. They have put something on the website, but it’s pretty weak because it’s something that the Council of Presidents passed in 1946. It reaffirms the AAUP Academic Freedom Statement, so that’s something. What I’ve done is to collect examples of Trustees at different universities affirming academic freedom, and sent them to the chair of CAPPR and the Chancellery. We’re still working on it and we should come out of it with a decent academic freedom policy that is widely available.

That’s about it except for me to say the conference on the politics of tenure was great. (switch to T1SB).

IV. Nominations and Election of Officers and Members-at-Large of the Executive Committee: Professor Sally Mettler (Chair, UFS Elections Committee) – …Susan O’Malley, of course our Chair whom you all know. Our candidates will be making statements of three minutes each as officer candidates, and then two minutes for members at large. But first, are there any further nominations? Nominations are closed. Time for statements.

Professor Crain (Psychology, City College) – I’m running for the Chair. My thinking began last year when we had our only chance for an official vote on the tuition increase, which I consider one of the huge blows to open access, and the UFS abstained. I thought we can’t be in that position, we have to be stronger than this, and then we have to be vigorous advocates for open access fighting for free tuition. And then recently we haven’t got it together in order to really vigorously oppose New York City Tech’s testing requirements for the Associate Degree Programs. They composed the test for the requirements for the Associate Degree Programs and they haven’t been able to really take a strong position on that. These are issues that, for the sake of our University and of standing for something, I believe we have to get going on, and I don’t want to see us be in a position…I want to do all I can to make sure that we do take strong stands on these issues that have to do with open access. The other points I’d like to make quickly are that we need to get rid of this policy that all motions from the floor in the plenary have to go to the Executive Committee first. This is a discouraging top down policy. We can’t complain about top down structures elsewhere if we’re going to implement a top down policy ourselves. We need to encourage new business, everything that comes from the floor, even if it’s risky to have things come from the floor, in order to get more initiative out of our members. I ask a lot of questions of the Chancellor when he comes but I believe that we should learn to work much more independently from the Chancellery. As it usually goes, we lean too much on the Chancellor, we feel honored that he comes, we ask questions, we applaud when he leaves, and usually we have little time for our own business. We need to take a chance to work independently from him. I think we’ll gain more power that way, although it will be difficult at first. We must restore student participation on the listserv. and stop banning and suspending people for going off topic. I don’t like that off topic either; people can put an asterisk if they’re going to put something off topic, but we cannot engage in censorship of any sort at this time. We cannot protest against censorship, the Patriot Act at the national level, we cannot protest against censorship at the University level, if we are exercising it ourselves. We simply have to stop this practice. I think that we should be inviting the Chancellor every three months, every three sessions, try to work without him, see if we can gather together and work out an agenda on our own. I realize that these are kind of bold measures. I have great respect for the leadership we have currently. I’m asking you to take a chance and consider whether we need to take some bold steps and even take some risks in order to develop more power and autonomy.

Chair O’Malley – To prepare for the Chair of the UFS I served for twelve years on the UFS Executive Committee, four years as Secretary of the body. In those twelve years I learned a lot from previous Chairs. Bob Picken, Sandi Cooper, and Bernie Sohmer have influenced me greatly. During those twelve years I also edited the Senate Digest and wrote about all of the academic initiatives of CUNY, but being Chair of the UFS is an enormous job. Nothing quite prepared me for the many committee meetings, the speaking in public, the disagreements and agreements with the Chancellor and various Vice Chancellors, the endless receptions, the trips to Albany. After two years I have some sense of how to do this job and would very much like to be reelected to continue the momentum that we have built together. For new people, this is a term limit job, so two more years and that’s it. Two years ago, when you elected me to be Chair of the UFS, your mandate to me was to strengthen the voice of the CUNY faculty by moving the UFS to become more central in the academic initiatives of East 80^th Street and to become an initiator of policy rather than simply reacting to the Chancellery. This I have tried to do by listening to the faculty at the plenaries and at governance leaders’ meetings, by listening to my Executive Committee and by developing a new Listserv for governance leaders and Senators to share information, for the job of Chair of the UFS is a job of representing faculty, as well as leading. In advancing the agenda of the faculty I have tried to be always extraordinarily well prepared and to act with dogged persistence in promoting our ideas with the Chancellery. Luckily, I have an enormous amount of energy and a much thicker skin than I had two years ago. In my Chair’s Report, I mentioned several initiative that I’m most proud of: the four conferences on the Pleasures of the Mind, the Integrated University, the Patriot Act in the University, and the Politics of Tenure; the Faculty Committee surrounding the Vice Chancellors -- I hope to tighten them up; the process of approving the Academic Integrity Report; the Faculty Recommendations to the Master Plan, and they will be going to the Regents; the development of the Faculty Experience Survey that will become part of evaluating the Presidents. I am also proud of our causing the Chancellor not to confer an honorary degree on Italian Prime Minister Berlusconi. Even if he is the richest man in Europe, he was under indictment. That was the first thing I did when I was elected; it was amazing; I did it with the help of a number of people. In the future, among many possible initiatives I would like us to develop is an official CUNY Policy on Academic Freedom approved by the Board of Trustees and sent to all Presidents and faculty. Perhaps we should hold a UFS conference on the blurring of the public and private in CUNY and in public higher education in general, or look at how the corporate model has penetrated our thinking about education. We might write a white paper together on the problems and the benefits of the Chancellery’s rush to centralization, and we could revitalize some of the languishing committees of the UFS, although many of the committees did excellent work this year. I hope that you will support me and reelect me as Chair of the UFS, and thank you.

Professor Mettler – All right, in that case you have your yellow ballot. I think we vote on this office right now and then move on. We do allocate time for this vote because the votes need to be counted before we move on to the next office, so as the person who is not elected to the Chair can be a candidate for the Vice Chair position. So we will collect these and count them as quickly as possible, thanks to Professor George Hill, and announce the results as soon as we can. Everybody please note Susan O’Malley has been reelected with 55 votes. Professor Bill Crain received 17 votes.

Professor Crain (Psychology, City College) – Even though it was a weak showing on my part, I want to congratulate the Chair O’Malley.

Professor Mettler – We want to move on to the next office, Officer Vice-Chair. We have one nominee, Professor Karen Kaplowitz from John Jay, and the floor is now open for further nominations.

Professor Davidson – At this time, Madame Chair person I’d like to move that the nominations be closed and that Professor Kaplowitz be declared Vice Chair person by acclamation.

Professor Mettler – Congratulations Professor Kaplowitz.

Our next office is the office of Secretary. We have one nominee, Professor Lenore Beaky, LaGuardia Community College.

Professor Davidson – Seeing no other nominees, on the floor, I’d like to move the nomination and election of Professor Beaky by acclamation. / Unidentified – We have to ask and see if there are any nominations. / Professor Mettler – Can we step back and ask if there are further nominations? Now, seeing none, Professor Davidson. / Professor Davidson – I’ll reinstate my motion to elect Professor Beaky by acclamation. / Professor Mettler – She’s acclaimed.

Moving now to the office of treasurer, our nominee to date is Professor Martha Bell of Brooklyn College, and are there further nominations? / Professor Davidson – Since I’ve heard none, I’d like to move the election of Martha Bell as Treasurer for another two years by acclamation. / Professor Mettler – Congratulations, Professor Bell.

And now we move on to the election of candidates for members at large, and you’ll notice on your handout that we have six nominees so far from whom we’ve received written statements. Professor Sohmer has indicated that he is withdrawing his candidacy because of his very likely retirement in the fall, and that reduces our number of candidates to five for five. Nevertheless, with due respect for Professor Sohmer, are there further nominations from the floor. / Professor Davidson – Seeing no further people rising for nominations for this position, I’d like to move that the five individuals whose names are up on the board, who happen to be the incumbents, be elected by acclamation. / Professor Mettler – Congratulations to all.

V. New Business:

A. Discussion of Open Access – Invited Guest, Martin Blume, American Physical Society: Chair O’Malley – I’d like to move the agenda. Will Phil Pecorino come to present and preside over the next part of the program.

Professor Pecorino (Queensborough Community College) –I’m Chair of the Information Literacy and Computer Technology Committee, and in that regard the issue of open access or access to electronic databases came before the committee, and we have a proposal that really isn’t all that urgent any longer because we’ve succeeded with the University and other University bodies in having them accept the concept. Times have changed and this idea has arrived. It’s so new to the scene in our academic time that it’s clear that we can’t tell the route it’s going to take from this point on. I’m here to introduce the basic concept and then we have our guest speaker, who represents kind of the middle ground, which is a wide amount of territory, between two extremes.

The world has changed because of the Internet; it makes things possible people couldn’t dream of before and, as I said, we can’t tell what 20 years from now all of this will bring, but in the world of the academy that moves slowly this is an idea that’s moving quite rapidly around the world amongst our colleagues. Since the information that we now gathered can be disseminated by this new device, questions have come up about how best to use it, and it represents a challenge to our traditional modes of communication. The Internet is a depository, an archive, and a dissemination machine. What’s all of this about? Access to that information. In the past, when our information had been gathered, to disseminate it we printed it, and when printing came about so copyright came about, and the people that ran the presses controlled the flow of that information by taking the copyright from those that generated it. This is a generalization, but what’s being challenged I guess is fundamentally that model, where now faculty who generate the intellectual property are saying perhaps there are better ways to distribute that information. Open access as opposed to what? Toll access, fee access, versus free access. I don’t want to give too rigid a definition of open access; later when I return to the podium I’ll say what exactly it is that’s in the proposal. Open access is defined differently in different forums, but the basic idea is that the people of the world should have access to whatever is generated by folks such as us. I’m primarily concerned with the journals, not the textbooks, and where we stand now is this: This thing I mentioned as a worldwide movement picked up considerable speed in February 2002 in Budapest, when 30 well-known individuals with sufficient weight in the world community endorsed a protocol about faculty attempting to make their information available through open access journals. In Bethesda, Maryland in June 2003 another group involving librarian associations endorsed the idea. In Berlin in December 2003 dozens of countries and organizations and the United Nations World Summit on Information Society with members of 176 countries in December of 2003 endorsed the basic concepts about how we make available the information in the age of the Internet. There are over 24,000 in the world that publish 2.5 million articles every year. 600 of those journals, not a great number, but 600 of them are in some way open access. Of them, articles that represent about 75,000, 55% of those journal boards are willing to accept some form of self-archiving and making available the material in a preprint or post print fashion of some type, and there is a protocol called OAI where people can place information that can be accessed through various search engines. Of course, the final indication that this is about to go really big time is that both Google and Yahoo are looking for a way to make some money off of this. As the amount of information accumulates, I suppose they are going to develop some means to get access to it in a very effective, efficient fashion, with advertising to sell that type of access. So open access, more precisely, what does that mean? That when we who generate ideas and increase knowledge want to make it available, we want to make it available as quickly as possible to as many people as possible. This was pioneered in the sciences by folks who wanted their colleagues to give them responses to what it is they were working on, and it’s there, in those fields that we see some of the most advanced models for open access being illustrated.

Rather than my going on about why this is a good idea, I’m now going to introduce our guest, who will point out some of the difficulties. My background is in Philosophy, some of you know that, so I’m really intrigued by the concept, the idea, I’m up there in the platonic realms, but his gentleman has got to pay the bills, so he’s in the realm of the real. I spoke to him on the phone briefly and I’ve read a bunch of articles that he’s written, and my highest compliment to pay to him – you don’t know me that well, but this is a high compliment – is he’s a sensible person, and I think you’ll enjoy what he has to say. Martin Blume is the editor in chief of the American Physical Society on leave from his position as senior physicist at the Brookhaven National Laboratory. He received a BA from Princeton, a PhD in Physics from Harvard. Skipping over a lot of other things, he also holds a joint appointment as Professor of Physics at the State University of New York at Stonybrook; he’s one of us, he’s a faculty member; that’s a high compliment too. Since 1996 he’s been Editor in Chief of the American Physical Society with responsibility of all of the physical review journals, the physical review letters, and the review of [moment] physics, which are among the most prestigious in the world of physics publishing. He frequently writes in journals published by Elsevier and others like that, from whom the university systems have withdrawn their subscriptions in acts of various types of defiance and protest…[skip in tape]…cooperates in terms of the bottom line, the dollars. We have on the other hand those who are in the world of science, who want immediate access to the word community, and they want some form of getting the materials out there one way or another. They’re more idealistic than even I am. They’re not generated by saving the money. In the middle ground are places like CUNY who says, "Wow, we spent over a million and a half dollars to those corporations. If our faculty could publish in ways where everybody would get it for free, look at what we would save!" So it’s no wonder that in that kind of juxtaposition institutions like libraries and universities are going to favor one form or other of open access, but for small societies who publish journals, such as the ones which you operate, there are these practical concerns, and Dr. Blume will now present them to you, since he has a wide variety of ideas in that middle range - I guess worldwide you’ve been heard now - and people take them into serious consideration. I’ll return with what it is the committee is asking of us.

Dr. Blume – Thank you very much. I should give an important part of my pedigree that didn’t appear over there. I’m a graduate of PS 225 in Brighton Beach and also Abraham Lincoln High School, where I was captain of the Math team, city high scorer, and we were the city champions that year. In 1949 I received a huge trophy from Roy Campanella who came to Abraham Lincoln High School in order to present the athletic teams, and we were gymnasts of some sort. So that is the background that I bring to this.

Let me say a few words about the American Physical Society. The Physical Society celebrated its centennial in 1999, was founded in 1899, and was founded in a way as an objection to the way things were running in the American Association for the Advancement of Science. There wasn’t enough physics there and people weren’t playing an active role in it and there was only one meeting a year, so the Physical Society was founded. We have 42,000 members worldwide, we’re not a small society, and the connection with the City University is pretty close: our past President is Professor Myriam Sarachik from City College, and the Director of the Office of Public Affairs is Mike Lubell, who’s the Chair of Physics at City College. So we are closely intertwined with the City University.

Let me talk a bit about our journals as well. Our journals actually go back before the American Physical Society. The Physical Review was founded at Cornell in 1893, and at that time the United States was essentially a scientific backwater, as is quite clear from some of the articles that were published in Physical Review at that time. However, over the years if you look at the articles that were published in the journals you’ll find that there is something like the beginning of a rainstorm, a little drop here of a significant article, another one in another and another. I’m an opera buff also, and one of the examples that I can give is the storm in Rossini’s Barber of Seville, which starts just that way with a few notes and then there’s a torrent at the end, and this is what’s happened. The articles in our journals are always significant, and it’s safe to say that they’ve changed our view of the universe and they’ve changed the way we live. The nice thing about it is that a few years ago we’ve had the opportunity to scan in everything that was in print and also tag everything, which was the most significant part of it, so that the entire content is available as a body of more than 300,000 articles, some extremely significant: the first mention of black holes, the laser, the transistor, quantum information, every year where the Nobel Prizes are announced. I no longer care who wins; I just want to know where they published. All of this is available electronically and it’s linked; you can browse through this, if you see a reference click on it and go immediately to the other reference. Furthermore, you can in our archive put in your name as the cited author and find every paper in the archive that refers to you.

One of the things that I have to talk about will be recovering costs, and one way in which we could make everything available would be the development of another search engine, and that search engine would be so popular and would commend so much money that we would be able to make everything else free. That search engine would find every paper that does not refer to you but that should have, and as academics I’m sure you would pay a fortune for this. So work on this. Let me turn more seriously to questions of open access. I’d mention first of all that open access for articles took hold back in the 60’s in an earlier revolution, the Xerox revolution, when preprints were much more widely distributed. In physics there were preprint libraries; I know in Brookhaven the preprints would come in and they would be put up there, and this was a form of open access. This took an important turn back in 1991 when Paul Ginsberg, then at Los Alamos and now at Cornell, started his e-print archive, where you submitted an article electronically and it was posted. And that has an enormous following and it’s spreading from its initial beginning in high energy physics; it’s spread throughout physics, now mathematics and the life sciences as well. We have used that archive, in fact the Physical Society first mirrored it, so that we were the first mirror in the United States so that there was an alternate point of access, and every now and then that has to be the case, and this is updated every night. One of the things that we’ve done is allowed authors to post their articles in the archive not just in advance, like preprints, but even to post the final version that is accepted for publication and put that up in the archive. This is a form of open access; it’s not enough to satisfy the most ardent zealots of open access, but it is open access. We insist on taking copyright, which I will come to and come back to in a moment and give you the reasons for it. However, if you look at our copyright form, I had all of this available but it’s a little too difficult for me to post these things and put them up, and I don’t want you reading something instead of listening to me as well. So the copyright form gives to authors all of the rights that they would have if they had copyright except the right to keep us from doing what we want to with the articles. That’s very important because without that we would not have been able to put all of these materials online back to 1893; our lawyers would not have allowed us to do this. The next question that comes up is why not take a license from the author and let the author retain copyright? There are two reasons for that. One is that a license in some countries does not allow people to give away what is not yet invented, so if this were done before electronic distribution and we had a license to do whatever we wanted to – some of you are familiar with the Tassini case that involved the New York Times, where some freelance writers were able to point out that the Times did not have the right to use their material and sell it to Lexus-Nexus for example, so the Times started to take these things down – you can’t give that away. Certainly in France and Germany this appears to be the case. That’s one reason; we don’t want a license that may not be valid for future technologies. More important, however, is the fact that at some time in the future people will want to have from an author a right to reprint it, and if the author holds copyright then they have to go find the author or they have to find the author’s heirs, and it is much better to have all of this in one place where the distribution can be centralized, provided it is the good guys like us, of course. So we have insisted on this, and this is an argument that you have to consider when you’re looking at copyright. Actually, rather than leave copyright with the authors, I would prefer to have everything without copyright, that is the way things are produced for the US Government. People working at government laboratories do not have copyright. The government puts it out in the open. That would be a better way of doing things.

Because of the form of our copyright we do have this type of open access. That is a physicist can publish in our journal and then do what they wish with the article. Indeed, you can say that there is open access at the discretion of the author, because the author is the one that has to post it. This is recognized and we also recognize the right to post it on institutional depositories, so that if one of the universities, or the City University wants to make a collection of all of the papers that have come out of City University, at least as far as our articles are concerned, they’re free to do it. Open access advocates have gone beyond this because they say that everything that we have done has to be open access, that is we have to make our archives and everything that we publish freely available, including all of the material that we have, and here is where we have trouble: we have to meet our costs. If you look closely at this you find that it is largely taking place in the life sciences and in the medical sciences as well. There is the difference in the way in which these things work and in the cultures of the different disciplines. In the life sciences, particularly in medicine, there are far more readers than there are writers. Many researchers will write and the articles are read by practicing physicians, who need access to this material; patients would like to have access to this material. This is a different way of dealing with things than it is in physics. In physics the readers and the writers are essentially the same, and in almost every case anyone who is writing articles is at an institution that has access to our journals by subscription. Even the New York Times in an editorial noted that it is not likely that the public is going to be demanding access to articles in high energy physics or cosmology or the like; they are not comprehensible. In fact, some years ago the Times wrote about an article in Physical Review and said this is arguably the most incomprehensible journal, and our Editor in Chief in fact wrote a lovely reply to this pointing out that any disciplinary article is incomprehensible to those outside the fold and that these things, the laser, the transistor, and so forth, were comprehensible enough so that people could read this and do something with it, so that it couldn’t have been all that incomprehensible to the people within the field.

We make our articles available in third world countries or in poor countries. In fact we do a lot of arranging so that we have consortium arrangements, and this is something that I would like to put before you here. Four years ago we just were starting to have consortium arrangements. A consortium is a group of institutions of which some may have subscriptions. The best example of this is OhioLink, which is a consortium that we have in the state of Ohio. What we offered them was to say, "if you take all of the institutions that are subscribing and add 10% to that cost, we will open this up even to the journals that they don’t have, but electronically it will be available to every institution in the state of Ohio." This doesn’t work very well if the institutions that are already subscribing have to come up with the money. Obviously, they don’t want to pay the extra 10%; why should the rest of these characters get a free lead off us? I can imagine that at the City University, as a matter of fact. But it is a very economical way of dealing with this, and you get quite a lot, and what we ask is that people maintain their subscriptions for three years at a time. In the past we have had to say there may be price increases. One of the things that I didn’t mention is that we receive in our journals 27,000 articles for publication every year. You might have seen the front page of the New York Times two weeks ago Monday, and right on the top there are statistics with a sign that the United States was falling behind scientifically, and this is based on the fact that only 28% of the articles in our journals come from the United States. This is important if we’re looking at open access, where we expect to recoup the cost from authors.

Let me back up too and talk about the open access as it is practiced with the Public Library of Science. The Public Library of Science is working in the life sciences and there they charge $1,500 to each author who submits. They may not collect it. There will certainly be people from third world countries who can’t pay it at all, and we ourselves in the past used to make a lot of money more than we did from the subscription cost from page charges, which are article charges. People in physics did not like to do this. The article charges came out of individual scientific grants; in the United States people are allowed to use this for page charges. I myself am sorry for some of the things I did before I got into publishing; I actually avoided publishing a paper in Physical Review and published in an Elsevier journal because they did not have page charges, and it was a choice that I had between paying page charges or sending a graduate student to a meeting; it’s the same money. And this is something that you’re going to find when you have author pays. You describe this as toll free; it is in fact not toll free. You have in one case toll for readers, free for authors, in the other case toll for authors and free for readers; there is a parallel between these two. The open access people who are pushing it – and, by the way, we have one journal which is entirely open access, it’s Physical Review Special Topics Accelerators and Beams, and we started it a few years ago; we funded it by sponsorship, which comes from large accelerator laboratories – it becomes more and more difficult to continue collecting from them. We meet our costs without the overhead on it, but that’s it, and we have to go out and we have to beg regularly. One of the sponsors is Brookhaven, I have an in there, so we collect from them, but not at other places where we have to beg from them; and it has international sponsorship. So we have an example of it but we’re having a hard time sustaining it. I predict that the people with open access now will have a hard time sustaining it. There is one other example, a very good journal, Journal of High Energy Physics, that was started as open access at the International Center for Theoretical Physics and they finally had to give up because they could not get enough money and they are now a subscription journal, so it’s going in the other direction. Also, in the life sciences, I’ll give you a personal example from being in bed last night with my wife, she was reading the American Journal of Psychiatry – she’s a psychiatrist, she had reason to do that – and she held this up to me and said, "will you look at this, this is all advertising." They had a significant source of revenue in advertising, and that carries over in the electronic version. If you look at the Public Library of Science you will find that they have advertising from big companies and they have also a list of the amounts that are expected. It’s like the sort of thing that you might see at the high holy days at the synagogue where you point out the rich people and try to get them to contribute. And in fact if you look at it, you expect $5,000 to $10,000 from a not for profit institution, and it goes up to $50,000 to $100,000 from larger pharmaceutical companies, for example, who will advertise, which is the main source of what you have over here.

So there are difficulties in sustaining a model like that, and one of the things that you have to look at is the culture of the different organizations. I have two things that I would say about this. You don’t want to impose a particular economic model on anyone, and that is what is being done here saying authors should pay. Now, they will allow the institutions to pay. If you look at the institutions you will find that many librarians are concerned about this, because you know darn well what’s going to happen; if the institution pays the provost will look at the subscriptions that the libraries have and say, "hey, you don’t need all of this money," and in the end it will actually be the libraries paying for it because their budgets will be cut. I know this because at Brookhaven when I was Deputy Director the library reported to me, and every year I would have to go to them and say, "you’ve got to cut subscriptions and things," and they knew what to do; they got a committee of the senior staff, and since I was one of them I would find the money somehow; they’d come in and say, "here are some things we can do without but we still need three quarters of the money that you said," and I would say OK, but if you had somebody more strong willed than I was, it wouldn’t work as well.

Why don’t I stop at this point because we’re going to go back and forth on this. I think I’ve said enough about it. I have said to the people from the public library of science one other point. They have a $9 million dowry that they got from the Gordon Moore foundation, and we could do a lot with a $9 million dowry, certainly make our back files available. But they’ve also spent an incredible amount of money on public relations and lobbying. And one of the things that I’ve said is that I really wish that they would do one thing: shut up and do it; make it work. After a year and a half they have only ten or eleven articles per month per issue with a lot of money that has been spent on it. They’re doing marvelous things with it, they put in summaries, they have fine editorials about open access and they have advertising, but they still have to show that this is sustainable when some of the sponsors have dried up, when the $9 million is gone, and when they are charging authors. I certainly don’t want to bet our store on this. We’re doing very well at the moment; our prices are the lowest around. We actually are lowering our subscription prices next year because we’ve effected a lot of savings through other means, which I’ll also be happy to tell you about. But it is a very complex issue and it is not one in which an economic model should be put forward. The final word that I’ll state is that open access or electronic publishing as a whole is not a theoretical science, we can discuss this endlessly, it’s an experimental art, and this is spoken by a theoretical physicist.

Professor Pecorino (Queensborough Community College) – So we’re in the midst of a change and we can’t even see the parameters yet under which the various forces will work out what will be in ten or twenty years. The committee that brings this resolution to the Senate is not seeking to impose any economic model on anybody; it’s saying that we should be involved in what’s happening in a way that serves our own interest. Right now at Columbia University they have a similar body to this one who are dealing with this scholarly publishing and the principles of open access, moral principle affirmation concerning copyright and ownership, and their Senate said, "take it back and bring it to us again in a simplified fashion," so they’re reworking it. NYU has adopted some resolution; California University system has as well. So what are we here at our UFS for? If you still have a copy of the resolution somewhere it had three Resolves, and the first resolve was that the City University of New York commit itself to open access provision by signing something like the Berlin declaration or the Budapest one (there is a whole bunch of B’s there; any one of them will do); the second was that the University provide a mechanism through which the faculty and staff can self-archive; and the third had to do with really us, the faculty, that the University with the UFS determine the most efficient and effective manner in which CUNY faculty will participate in open access protocols. Now the two versions of the Master Plan that were distributed to us, each of them had under the section called libraries a statement that in effect endorsed open access. The last version, I think it’s dated May 5, says, "the establishment of partnerships among academic and library faculty, IT offices, and appropriate organizations such as the New York State Higher Education initiative to establish regional archival repositories." This is what our resolution was asking for, so I guess some CUNY administrators figure it’s going to be cheaper to hook up with some consortium establishing the archives. And you heard Dr. Blume say he doesn’t mind the archiving of materials, so we’re not doing anything that runs counter to what your society is doing with its publications, but we are, in asking our faculty to do this, running counter to what Elsevier and a few other large publishing houses are doing. So we’re here before you to ask for an endorsement that we recommend that faculty consider participating in this by doing one of two things: publishing in a suitable journal for whatever their discipline is in an open access manner, and if there is one available or they choose not to do that at least to self-archive in some way what it is that they’ve produced, which, as you’ve heard from Dr. Blume, many journals operating under the protocols you have established would not be jeopardized or harmed by in any way, and on the other hand it would rapidly and vastly increase the amount of access for people who couldn’t afford it through whatever the protocol is, I call it toll or fee access; but it says nothing about whether we should move from a reader fee to an author fee; that’s for time to work out. My guess is, and I guess foolishly, that in twenty years, when it’s only 10% of everything we produce now in open access, I think that might shift to the opposite extreme. I don’t know if I’ll be around in twenty years but if any of you are jot that down, see if I was correct. How organizations such as the American Physical Society will be operating I don’t know; I don’t think anybody does; but given the variety of models that have been worked out by you and the others it’s likely that you will continue in some form, since what’s being advocated by the extremists on everything is free and open doesn’t really threaten what you’re doing if people self-archive and present for peer review their materials. What I guess is behind this in terms of our institution is avoiding the other extreme where we would be priced out of access by Elsevier and other publishing houses. As Dr. Blume pointed out, it’s mainly the life sciences where you have a lot of readers and a lot of people needed very quickly because they’re doing research or they’re applying that research in practice, so the resolution before the body is that we, the faculty, catch up with where our colleagues are around the world and where our own institution CUNY is going in making use of this alternate mode, not as the one and only mode for publishing but as the alternate mode now coming along, known as open access, or if you prefer self-archiving or, if you just prefer this, what’s called the Budapest open access initiative. That’s it. It’s kind of simple. It’s mainly an educational effort. I don’t want to diminish the importance of this body but we no longer need the resolution, because on the one hand we’ve got CUNY who’s going to build the archiving engine and storage location and we have the Council… (tape switch) …but it would be good if we, the faculty, could affirm it in some way and participate in that initiative to educate us as to what the alternatives are. This is a website that’s got a whole lot of information that was prepared by the committee for all of you, and if anybody wants more information on it just let me know, we’ll gather it; even if Dr. Blume wants me to put these there, we’ll put them there. / Dr. Blume – Just a word about the Budapest open access. There are two types of statements that were made in Budapest, and they made a very strong effort to make the American Physical Society to sign on because one of them concerns self-archiving; the other, however, meant making everything that we have done, everything that is available, available free, that is our own archives, all of the material, including what we have invested pretty heavily in, and I objected very strenuously to that and did not sign on it. So if you talk about the Budapest principles I’d say half of it is fine; the other half is saying you have to make everything available without access barriers, and we can’t do that. In fact a colleague of mine at Stanford, who is a member of their Faculty Senate, was faced with a similar resolution there. Both of us are advocates of open access, but we have to find an economic model for it. We exchanged some e-mails and he did manage to get their resolution changed so that it did not impose a particular economic model or demand that everything be free. I would like to add the diatribe that I wrote to him in the e-mail: "I should add that I detest the use of the word ‘principle’ to describe what is simply a desire on the part of those who put the word forward. The Microsoft Word dictionary, which I have on my computer, gives us a meaning of principle ‘a standard of moral or ethical decision making.’ I don’t think the Washington principles, the Bethesda or the Budapest principles rise to such heights. Words that could be substituted besides desires include guidelines, or even lusts. There is nothing moral or ethical about open access any more than there is something immoral or moral about charging authors instead of institutions. As they said in the Godfather, ‘O una cosa di business.’

Professor Philipp (Chemistry, Lehman College) – I have two questions, one on topic and the other off. On topic, you’ve mentioned a certain attraction to publishing in commercial journals, that is to say the lack of pay charges, but there is a countervailing tendency if these journals are no longer subscribed to by academic libraries that these journals will have very few readers and the readers will only get access to them for the abstracting literature and have some difficulty getting to the paper copies. Do you think that this countervailing tendency will in a sense correct the situation, make the commercial publishers less important in the academic environment than they are today? / Dr. Blume – I should mention our response to this. Essentially, we have been doing away with page charges. Page charges are voluntary and in fact they exist only in our premier journal, Physical Review Letters; there they are voluntary. We actually try to get more people to volunteer by taking off a check box that said "I will not send this in" and it cost us more trouble, so we are just letting that go. So we are being driven out of the author pays model. And also for our other journals there are no page charges if the article has been submitted electronically and we can use it in configuration. / Professor Philipp – So you stand to deprive the commercial journals of their source from articles and readers. / Professor Blume – That’s right. / Professor Philipp – My off topic question relates to a forum that this Senate held some time ago, at which an official of your society spoke, that is to say we had a forum on the Patriot Act. It turned out that several academic publishers, without telling the members, were refusing to accept papers by people in embargoed countries. I’m thinking particularly of the American Society of Microbiology, which did so secretly. / Dr. Blume – And the IEEE. / Professor Philipp – The IEEE did it publicly. At least its members knew that it was happening at least at some point, maybe not initially. Is there not or should there not be a statement of principles, and this time using the word principles, that such actions barring some authors from publishing because they happen to live in a country are unethical. / Dr. Blume – We have so stated and we will accept papers solely on the basis on their scientific content and not in any way on the origin of people. When the ruling came out from the Office of Foreign Asset Control of the Treasury, some of our editors were concerned about this, because there is a $50,000 fine and ten years imprisonment. In order to settle this I established a new position for our journal, which I called the designated felon, only in the American League of course, and I was the designated felon for us. At one point I thought I was going to have to go bunk with Martha Stewart in the federal penitentiary. The ruling came down; it is still unsatisfactory, and it is even worse that there is another ruling that states it’s all right for the journalists to do this if you edit but it is not all right for an American author to co-author with an Iranian author or the like. So this is the case and this is in effect right now, but the US Government has a large collaboration with an Iraqi group that is part of it. So if they publish the Americans will be subjected to the need to get around this. The same thing is true for the people investigating the earthquake that took place in Iran. This is joined between the US and the Iran, and yet here is this ruling that says that if they publish they’re subject to up to ten years in jail. This is outrageous and we have argued strenuously against it. / Professor Philipp – Thank you for your courage in taking the position as designated felon.

Professor Baumrin (Philosophy, The Graduate School and University Center) – Two things: The first is to be very brief. Your team beat my team that night by one point; it’s Stuyvesant; a miscarriage of justice. I’ll let that one go by. I have a concern through all of this discussion, which stated boldly is something like this: There are probably about a hundred journals in philosophy; there may not be more than two hundred readers worldwide. It isn’t much of a market, and while we have the publishers and the libraries duped into buying these journals we have a place to proffer information that no one actually wants. Now I don’t see how anything that you said would encourage anyone in this field or a few related fields like it to think that this was a good idea. I mean it’s nice that you have Phil Pecorino as an enthusiast for this. I’m not an enthusiast because I don’t understand how it’s going to work. I think that it’s going to put out of business most of the journals in my field. / Dr. Blume – Is that bad? / Professor Baumrin – From an information point of view it probably won’t matter, because you can’t sell this stuff, you can’t patent it, and nobody reads it, it just filters out in sociology courses, and history courses, and even English literature courses by and by. / Dr. Blume – And it gets you tenure too. / Professor Baumrin – Well, if we didn’t have any journals we’d figure out some other way, maybe by good teaching. But you need to answer the question. Marginal journals exist only because libraries believe they have to have them, and it seems to me that open access, unless I misunderstand it, encourages libraries not to. / Dr. Blume – They get them; whether they like them or not, they’re there. / Professor Baumrin – So why should they pay anybody for it? Why should they pay this unified fee? You’ve got this figured out. / Professor Pecorino – Look, why do we submit those articles to the journals? I guess we want a few people to read it, but mostly the people are under pressure to "publish or perish." Now if you move to an open access model, even in the Humanities, you can get together a board that’s your editorial board, do your peer review, and it ends up in electronic form of dissemination rather than in print form. You’ve got what the academy wants in terms of peer review, you’ve got your way of saying, "look, my peers consider the high quality of my work," but folks that you want to read it will have access to it. If you’re one of the journalists that are trying to make a dollar or two off of selling it to libraries, they’re going to be in some difficult shape in a discipline like ours, but I don’t think people publish in philosophy or show in editorial boards to make money. So the journals that are out there for the sake of pure joy… / Professor Baumrin – OK, but there is a transition. / Professor Pecorino – There’s a transition over into another form of making those ideas available. / Professor Baumrin – It’s so optimistic to say that the major dozen journals are going to transform into electronic journals, which they would have to, in order for this to work. Peer review the electronic journals and the print form just dies! / Professor Pecorino – There are a lot of universities that were behind a lot of our scholarly journals, and those universities that went to publishing them in print form had the contract with presses of buy one and develop one of their own will have a different way of disseminating information. But I don’t know for sure. Stick around. / Dr. Blume – Just a word about that. I became Editor in Chief six years ago and I said at that time in five years we’ll be out of the print distribution, and I haven’t flip-flopped, I still state in five years we’ll be out of it, but only 16% of our subscriptions are electronic only because there’s a price discount if you don’t take print, 15%, and also abroad people save money. It took a long time for this to happen because people had to have the confidence that they will have access to the electronic one.

Professor Levine (Engineering Science and Physics, College of Staten Island) – I will continue to publish in Physical Review and will continue to read it and prefer in electronic form, but I have two concerns, one on one side, one on the other side. I am very troubled by the model of supporting journals on advertisements from the pharmaceutical industry or equivalent thereof. I’m more troubled by that than any other economic model that anyone has proposed; that’s on one side. But I am equally troubled by the prospect that CUNY, in seeking this ideal of open access, will stop providing subscriptions to the electronic forms of for example the Physical Review, and that troubles me even more. / Dr. Blume – It is one of the concerns that I have. If you look at this, it’s aimed really at commercial publishers, because what’s brought this about is the fact that they’ve raised prices so high that they can’t be afforded anymore. However, what will happen is that the smaller publishers, and even though we’re a large society we are a smaller publisher, will be driven out first because we don’t have as deep pockets. Fortunately we have a reasonable reserve that’s been built up that fluctuates every day with the stock market; we’ve had several bad years. But we have also been working assiduously to reduce costs, and we are actually reducing our subscription cost this year because we’ve made significant savings, both internally in our workings and also in getting better prices from our vendors for composition and production. And that is a pressure that we hope will keep us in business and keep libraries subscribing. The other part of it is, I will offer again, if there is anyone at CUNY who would be willing to discuss once more the possibility of a consortium agreement. We could make everything much more widely available as well, at every campus. / Professor Levine – I would hope that CUNY would do that. / Dr. Blume – We need a little extra in there too. / Professor Pecorino – The librarians here know this better than I do, but CUNY has already started to reduce the subscriptions, particularly to the most exorbitantly priced vendors, so it’s happened already, and I think what CUNY sees is that twenty years down the line, as I see it, it supports this motion and will eventually be able to give greater access to information at less cost to the institution. But right now we’re not calling for us all to stop publishing in total journals. It’s just that self-archiving in the meantime, as the paradigm shifts, should be involved.

Professor Morawski (Digital Art, Brooklyn College) – I am member of the IEEE, which for everyone that doesn’t know is a big electrical engineering organization, and I don’t think there is a concern for bigger organizations like that where I think there’s a lot of room. But I think Stefan made a very good point in that with philosophy, for example, where there might not be as much competition…I mean I think it’s nice of you to say that people will get together and there will still be an outlet for peer review, but the model you were suggesting puts a lot more work on the shoulders of the people at that level. Oh, you’ll just get together with a group of your colleagues and start your own little online peer review form, which is great, but one thing that these publishing organizations bring to the table is they have the structure, they have an editor, they have people that this is their job to do day to day. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I think a lot of us are so overworked at this point that the last thing we need to worry about is not only doing our peer and publishing but on top of that creating our own outlet to do peer review. So I think there are still some things that need to be worked out with the model. / Dr. Blume – What I was going to say is that there is an apparent diseconomy of scale between smaller journals and large journals. When we receive 27,000 articles, we have an internal staff of 35 editors and 50 remote editors spread around the world, plus an editorial board and the like, and all together a total of 140 people working in our offices to handle this, and we’re drinking from the firehose really. I have some graphs that I can show you that show the rate at which these things are going up, and the first four month of this year have been horrendous, with 12% above the last year in submissions, and we’re just trying to handle all of this. So all of our editors would like their families to eat, the remote editors spend a lot of time with people at universities who take advantage of their 20% time that we pay them, not just the 20% of what their salaries are but the 20% of what they think they’re worth, which is more, so we have a lot of expenses. Every year we have to wrestle with the cost of medical benefits going up, all of these things. Don’t feel sorry for us. The one point that I wanted to make is if you have a journal that receives 200 articles or 100, this can be handled by a single editor who might be a faculty member, and it might be someone who was just going to be making a fuss on the Provost who’s so happy to have the person preoccupied in order to get time off to work on that. They can bootleg whatever is needed electronically; you can do this. It is apparently cheaper because you don’t count the cost of Internet access, all that is bootlegged one way or another; it’s hidden in the university budget. And so journals like that are not as vulnerable as we are. / Professor Morawski – I understand that, but all I’m saying is that as we move forward let’s remain realistic instead of just saying it will work itself out and we’ll find a way in the event that they go under because of the competition or the movement. I just think we need to have going forward a plan. / Dr. Blume – If you have an editor in an institution you can be sure he wants subscriptions. / Professor Morawski – True. Thank you.

Professor Galvin (Library, Kingsborough) – I have an undergraduate and Master’s Degree in Philosophy. We seem to have a lot of philosophers here tonight. I guess I wanted to make a few comments. First of all it seems in library land nobody expects the Humanities journals to follow the same model as the Science journals. There’s more of an urgency in science. Everybody wants to read it yesterday. Somehow, in Humanities that doesn’t work. The thing with making the greedy Elseviers of the world go under, people say, "well, the libraries will just stop subscribing;" you don’t realize what power you guys have. We can’t just go cancel subscriptions; you’ll kill us; you really will. So it’s hard to make those guys go under or at least be a little less greedy. I started reading the debate on electronic and open access in Nature today online and then I was thoroughly embarrassed because I just signed off on an invoice for over $4,000 to get Nature, one single journal. I’m sure that yours, Stefan, is much cheaper. / Dr. Blume – No, our journals are very thick. If you just look at the cost of the journal it’s like saying "here’s a bottle with ten aspirins in it, here’s one with a hundred; which is cheaper? You have to ask how many articles are in it. / Professor Galvin – But I think that the open access movement is more aimed at the greedy ones. You’re breaking even. / Dr. Blume – The danger that it might drive some of the good ones out first is what concerns me. / Professor Galvin – That would concern everyone.

Professor Lewis (English, York College) – I teach journalism and I used to own a book packaging company for quite a few years, I was also an agent for quite a few top writers, and I’m currently writing a book on the book publishing industry. Open access for the limited universe that you’re talking about, and these are very limited universes, is one thing; and what you’re debating as far as where you draw the line with author rights, where you draw the line with how information is disseminated, and how the author becomes less and less of a factor in these decisions, might work in these limited universes. But the problem is the rules that you’re setting and the precedents that you’re setting are eventually going to be carried over to the broader publishing universe. And a lot of professors and writers who spent quite a few years to put together materials and to generate the material that’s needed to feed all these commercial publications, book publishing houses and other things, they’re going to lose the right to their own work and their control over their own careers is going to be badly damaged by some of the ideas that are being put forward here in a different context. / Dr. Blume – I agree completely with you. / Professor Lewis – But the problem is that the people who eventually will be most hurt are not part of the dialogue. / Dr. Blume – That’s correct. And that’s one of the points that I would make: if you impose open access and you set principles, consider where those principles can lead in other cases. We often forget this because the principles are crafted to give you the result that you want, but the result that you might not want is that the same arguments that hold for research that is important to US government funds hold for the textbooks from professors at a university that is publicly funded. Why should those textbooks not be completely available? Why should students be charged for them when a salary has been paid? This is a kind of argument that follows and is very much parallel to the open access argument that is made. / Professor Lewis – Of course there is always going to be the counter argument that people who are involved in that are living up to their contract, the faculty are living up to their teaching contracts by the amount of committees they sit on, whatever else is involved. Their intellectual work and the work that they produce for magazines and for newspapers and for book publications is not under that same contract, and when you start to break down the barriers between those two worlds then somebody is going to be getting really badly hurt by that, and it’s totally unfair. / Dr. Blume – There are some universities that have declared the works of faculty works for hire. / Professor Lewis – I won’t even go there. But let me just say something else. You were talking before about the idea of journals and different publications and even different universities having the ability to collect certain work and how that’s one of the excuses, one of the motivations, for open access. Well, you know, a writer should start with, all of you should start with, all the rights to your own work. Then you decide which rights you want to sell and under which circumstances. When it comes to magazine work the preferable thing to do is sell first North-American rights, then you can separately sell second North-American rights; world rights are separate. But what you can do is, if you’re dealing with a public institution, if you’re dealing with a non-profit organization, if you’re dealing with a special discipline that you feel you want the support, when you sell those first North-American rights you can also grant them anthology rights, and that would allow them to collect it in whatever works they want to collect it down the line. What’s happening more often than not is institutions now and private businesses are trying to prevent the author who created the works…(tape switch)

Female voice - …extent changed some of the focus of my own piece, and although I’m enthusiastic about open access and its potentialities, I think I first became aware of it when I read about MIT putting online all their courses, and that just seemed to me amazingly exciting. But on the other hand I just wonder what that new situation will create for me as an author and to what extent…I guess I have no control, I don’t know if I have any more control to lose. / Dr. Blume – You have control in that if you really don’t want to give away a copyright you can publish some place where they don’t require you to give away the copyright. We do, and I gave you the reasons for it, so that we can create anthologies and make corrections of the paper and be sure that we don’t have to go and hunt down the heirs of an author to do something new. So if we didn’t take it, there are other places. /

Chair - I think the resolution will be brought in the fall and we’ll look at it once again. We have a June meeting scheduled, but I have the feeling that nobody really wants to come on June 8. There was also a concern about tracking resolutions. All resolutions passed in this body will be tracked, and we’ll have on our website what has happened to each resolution since it was passed.