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

[Music] imagine you work in a library and one day a van pulls up in front of your building several people get out they come into your library and they show you a list and they say according to our records you no longer have access to these 5,432 books they March into your Stacks pull those books off the shelves load them in the van and drive off what just happened it looks like theft right strangers coming unannounced into your library and making off with a significant chunk of your collection my name is Jeff Edmonds and I do work in a library I've been with the Penn State libraries here well over half my life and I can tell you that is bizarre as far as that scenario sounds it plays out in essence every single day not only here at Penn State but at libraries all over the country as the result of the shift in our collections from books to ebooks quick show of hands how many of you have ever purchased a book I hope everyone in the audience now how many of you have ever purchased an ebook would it surprise you to learn that you didn't purchase an ebook that it's impossible to buy an ebook to understand why we have to look at us copyright law specifically the part of the law that codifies what you can and cannot do with the book that you've purchased when you buy a book that book becomes your personal property you own it you can do whatever you want with it you can even resell it and if you do resell it you get all the money the copyright holder be it the author or the publisher has no claim on that sale now imagine if that were true for ebooks imagine if you could buy and resell an ebook the same way you can buy and resell a printbook we all know that it's infinitely easier to create copies of and distribute copies of digital objects like an ebook compared to a print object like a physical book so as the internet became a thing Publishers realized they faced a crisis if consumers could buy and resell ebooks the same way we can buy and resell print books their profit margins would evaporate and the publish in Industry would collapse so what did they do they made a very astute decision they decided to not sell ebooks so when you clicked on buy it what you were paying for was not that ebook you do not own that ebook you were merely buying a license to access that text now if this distinction between buying and owning outright a print book versus paying for a license to access an ebook seems minor to us as individual consumers for libraries like the one here at Penn State where I work that collect millions of ebooks this distinction has profound and unsettling implications let's start with the sense of scale this is the libraries catalog we currently have about 10 million items of those more than 6 million are online they digital their ebooks fewer than 4 million are actual physical books in the stacks so already the majority of our collections are online they're ebooks and because they're ebooks they're not owned in the same way our print collections are they're subject to licensing and because they're merely licensed they're subject to removal every month we're compelled to remove thousands tens of thousands and some months even hundreds of thousands of eBooks from our catalog this is the van pulling up in front of our building and making off with a chunk of our collection which begs the question who's driving the van if libraries don't own and control their book collections who does the simple answer is Publishers and in the realm of scholarly publishing the kind of publishing that concerns Us in an environment like Penn State there are five Publishers that control the marketplace it's an oligopoly and because they control the marketplace they leverage their advantage in several different ways first the cost of ebooks is artificially high on average it costs more to license an ebook than it does to buy a print book outright second the cost of ebooks over the past several decades has risen much faster than the rate of inflation third Publishers compel libraries to sign contracts that include non-disclosure clauses so that we can't discuss prices with our peer institutions Penn State for example can't go to the University of Michigan or ruter or UCLA and ask how much did you pay for this package of ebooks we have no way of determining what a fair market Price is fourth Publishers bundle their content together so that we're compelled to license thousands and even tens of thousands of ebooks that we neither want nor need imagine you're in the grocery store and you go into the cereal aisle and you pull your favorite cereal off the shelf and put it in your cart and a clerk at the end of the aisle says what are you doing you say well I'm buying this cereal and they say no no no you can't do that store policy is that you have to buy one of each it's absurd right and yet that's what publishers are doing to libraries forcing us to end up with thousands of things we neither want nor need now this very uneven unfair relationship becomes even more absurdist when you consider where the knowledge comes from that populates these ebooks who's creating this knowledge well in a word we are this is how SC Godly publishing Works Scholars do research they write manuscripts those manuscripts are passed to peers who then make comments the comments are passed back to the authors who then revise their manuscripts to improve them and then ultimately an editor or an editorial board decides that this manuscript is worthy of publication say as an ebook or as an article in a scotle journal now note that all of the intellectual labor I just described from start to finish is done at universities the salaries of these people are paid for by universities and how are universities funded well three ways of primary importance first tuition monies so if you're a student paying tuition your money is being used in part to fund this Enterprise of knowledge creation second taxpayer dollars like many institutions Penn State is a public university we depend on money from the Commonwealth every year for our operating budget so here you have taxpayer dollars being used to fund this Enterprise of knowledge creation third Grant monies while some grants can originate from a private individual or private Enterprise the vast majority have a strong publicly funded component so again public funds being used to fund this Enterprise of knowledge creation so we've funded this process we've done the work we've created the knowledge and then what do we do with our manuscript we hand it off to one of these Publishers who then license it back to us at enormous cost the libraries here at Penn State spent over $13 million on ebooks and other electronic resources last year given the Dire Straits in which higher education finds itself we know for example that Penn State just a couple of years ago was facing $142 million budget defit this ecosystem makes no economic sense it's a broken system what could we do to correct it well what if we thought of our knowledge the knowledge that we collectively fund and create not as a private commodity to be handed off to some third party but is a public good what if we thought of it in the same light that we think of good roads sound Bridges a Dependable electrical grid clean air clean water what would that look like in practice in this context well first of all we could say goodbye to these Publishers they need us because we do all the work we don't need them here's an example this is a scolly journal known as lingua it's published by elvir elvir is the largest of those five Publishers their profits last year exceeded $2 billion and annual subscription to lingua costs a library over $2,500 about a decade ago the editors of lingua led by the executive editor a Belgian linguist by the name of Johan rurick decided to walk they said goodbye to elsir because they were disgusted with its pricing models they left and they started their own journal glossa same topic Linguistics same quality same edites except unlike linga gloss is free it's what we call Open Access Open Access literature is literature that's freely available online and free of all or nearly all licensing restrictions if we expand that concept of open access to something else that's of vital importance to an environment like Penn State textbooks we end up with what are called open educational resources or OE we know that the cost of textbooks has risen over a th% in the past 40 years and the prices of textbooks continue to rise at a rate three times the rate of inflation research we've done locally at Penn State has shown us that over half of Penn State students 65% have elected not to buy a textbook because it was too expensive and nearly a third 31% have elected not to take a course because the materials were too expensive this is the open textbook library in the libraries catalog it's a collection of over 1,500 textbooks in all disciplines that are freely available online they're free and they're freely adaptable by that I mean that if a Penn State Professor were to find a textbook in this collection that was perfectly suited to their course except for let's say two chapters they could remove those chapters or rewrite them and upload their version of the textbook to make it freely available to their students as a sustainable model this sure beats the heck out of asking every student in every section of those courses to Shell out 75 or1 or $150 for a textbook that they will probably never use after that course completes if we expand that notion to its broadest possible application we end up with this for several years now the libraries have been working assiduously to identify to locate to make discoverable resources that are not controlled by Publishers that are freely available online free to read these are things that are not behind a pay wall you don't need to authenticate as a Penn State user to look at them they will still be accessible to you after you leave Penn State in fact they're accessible now to anyone with internet access the number currently stands at over 1,200,000 and we expect to see this number rise as we continue our work as I said at the beginning I've been with the libraries for well over half my life over 35 years and I've come to believe that libraries are a fundamental pillar of democracy democracy demands an informed citizenry and informed citizens must have free and Equitable and open access to information and to knowledge especially the knowledge that we've collectively funded and created knowledge is not a private commodity to be handed off to some third party knowledge is a public good and it must be treated as such thank you [Applause]