What to do?
Peter Suber says that we’re mostly in agreement about the Google journals deal, and in his understated way, points out that I haven’t put forward any alternate plan of action for journals without a digitized backrun.
Fair cop. If I were in those shoes, here’s what I’d do: sit back and wait, at least for now. I think Suber is right that OCA or someone else will come up with a better deal. If enough publishers express their wariness to Google, Google itself may come up with a better deal! The opportunity cost of waiting is negligible, so why rush in?
Journal publishers will have figured this out already, but for those playing along at home: Google’s deal only works for journals who consider open digital access an acceptable publication and dissemination mechanism. Not all journals will agree with that, be it because of book-smeller bias or a perceived need to continue to charge rents on the backrun. Moreover, a Google deal makes only limited sense for a journal with no plans to publish current runs electronically. I don’t know how many journals that actually is, but it must be larger than zero.
If none of those concerns applied to my journal, however, I’d be looking for a better OA partner than Google while I waited. Not a few journals in this situation will have formal or informal affiliations with institutions. Those institutions have libraries. Do those libraries have publishing-services or conversion or scanning outfits? Do they have an institutional repository? How about an OJS installation? If they do, that’s assuredly where I would go first. (Would I, as a repository manager, welcome a newly-OA journal backrun? With open arms! And I can give it OAI-PMH exposure as well as Google juice. Can Google?)
The hard part is going to be funding. Library digitization arms are often cost-recovery outfits, though repository storage, bandwidth, and preservation are generally free to the storer. (We’re libraries. Storage and preservation are our job.) Still, for a journal that has no OA backrun, I would think grant funding could be had, or even institutional funding for a particularly interesting journal (or a particularly prominent faculty member, as many journal editors are). If this journal-digitization thing catches on, I wouldn’t be surprised to see funds earmarked at some grant agencies precisely to take digitized backruns OA.
A journal that has some elbow-grease to contribute to the discussion will likely find a happier welcome in libraries. It’s much easier to teach proper digitization and metadata techniques and offer a reliable home for the result than it is to take on backrun digitization. If the slow, self-funded, elbow-grease road will work, consider it before signing with Google.
Another group that may be interested in digitizing your journal is journal database vendors. (If I were they, I’d be worried right now, in fact. They’ll have to show some pretty serious value-adds to withstand the Google onslaught. Some can, some can’t—and almost all need to re-evaluate their user interfaces, APIs, and data quality now.) One way for these folks to distinguish themselves amidst the Google onslaught is via unique content unavailable elsewhere. This obviously involves a tradeoff between digitization quality and open access.
Notably, these strategies are only likely to work if the journal is not already digitized. I’ll repeat this, louder: if you sign on with Google, you are destroying your chances at finding another partner. If that’s all right with you, fine. But don’t do it blindly!
Granting that I am severely biased in this matter, I trust libraries to digitize things right and keep them in good order a lot more than I trust Google or J. Random Database Vendor. Libraries have been hanging onto stuff long before anybody thought about ones with a lot of zeroes after them! If that matters to a journal publisher, that publisher should absolutely exhaust every library connection available before signing on with Google.
And if those connections are exhausted? I would go to Google and say “I’m interested, but…” with a list of caveats. At the very least I would insist that a copy of the bits from my journal be returned to me (with all applicable display, preservation, and change rights) should Google become unable or unwilling to host them. I would do my best to insist on data-quality and metadata-quality standards as well, though I rather suspect Google will be intransigent there.
I still think Google is a lousy deal, but I suppose I must accept that for some journals it’s the best deal going. If I’ve prevented some people with good intentions from blindly signing a bad deal and regretting it later, though, I’m happy, and I’m even happier if my advice means that some deals are less bad than they’d otherwise have been.