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The Maginot Line Moment: Which side to be on?

Author: Association des Amis de la Ligne Maginot d'Alsace (France) This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License.

“When World War I finally ended, France vowed never again to let Germany, the so-called “beast that sleeps on the other side of the Rhine,” violate its territory. French politicians and generals conceived the Maginot Line, a network of forts and blockhouses, as an obstacle to any future invasion. Although it has become notorious as a universal metaphor for bungling, the Line in fact was not the blunder it has been made out to be. In many ways it was a model of clever engineering and technological accomplishment.”

Source: Smithsonian Magazine June 1997

More than 70 years after all the French planning went for naught, there are still arguments about the scale of failure and unabashed admiration for the design.  Most historians focus on how one-dimensional French preparations and weak assumptions were no match for a multi-front German invasion that even included air power to simply fly over the ground fortified defenses. So who is who in our publishing Maginot Line situation between a group of publishers, professional societies, and politicians and the forces of upstart library organizations, open access advocates, and taxpayers? 

I don’t think the brain trust that thought up the Research Works Act (RWA) and found politicians to do their bidding had any idea of how serious their opposition would be…not so much the advocacy bunch, but their actual content creators: uncompensated scientific authors, sometimes in their role as uncompensated reviewers.  The same tools of social networking that fanned the tinder of unrest into flames in several Arab countries has also had the effect of amplifying the unhappiness of publishers’ greatest assets:  mostly uncompensated authoring and free copyright transfer, even voluntary “page charge” supplementary income that in many cases from mere authors that simply needed to publish or perish.  So in my analogy publishers and their allies are like the French, adept at setting up a massive scholarly publishing paradigm of low cost content and editorial labor in exchange for a path to status for academic scientist tenure-seekers.

The other part of this paradigm that has grown rigid  over the last 15 years is the shift of subscription costs from individuals to academic and corporate institutional libraries.  Finally, the rise of open access publishing and the implementation of a taxpayer-supported Public Access Policy put the writing on the wall for many publishers (like the French) that there would be a tipping point.  One publisher broke ranks and acquired Biomed Central (ironically it was a German publisher).   With a shift in scholarly publishing clearly gaining momentum,  a shoring up of commercial defenses was required, and RWA was introduced in the U.S. Congress.

I think many librarians and perhaps some library administrators, having extensive business contact with publishers, and  charged with bringing research content to their academic clientele, were constantly negotiating to “un-bundle”  journal packages and cutting unaffordable subscriptions. The main army for the attack on exorbitant publishing practices such as SPARC , E-Print Network, PUBLIC LIBRARY OF SCIENCE, PMC, etc. are in my Maginot analogy like the main German attack force, and the librarian collection specialists were a second front using a more subtle, mostly non-confrontational approach.  The commercial publishing vanguard, like the French, anticipated that their formidable line could counter both of these opposing forces through their primary weapon,  AAP lobbying and the expectation that librarians, by in large, are non-confrontational and often want to play nice with publishers and not be thought of as stubborn or outspoken.

Getting back to the history,  the Maginot Line could not account for the arrival of air power that didn’t have to travel through a wall.   I don’t think publishers or AAP realized that faculty authors and editors, particularly those already beyond the tenure track, could actually use and leverage a Web 2.0 tool like an online petition to make a point of unhappiness with the largest commercial journal publisher and organize a public boycott fueled by twitter and collegial email, currently at 2468 signatures, championed by math professors.

I was sitting with a faculty member this afternoon and happened to inquire if he had heard about the Elsevier boycott petition.  At that moment he had not, but he began to tell me about all the work he had done as an editor with only glory for compensation.  So it seems that the force of research faculty may be properly aroused to the damage that the RWA could do;  and of course there is a 4th front on the side open access and reformed publishing practices, an often overlooked and underestimated group:  tax payers that fund NIH research.  Never underestimate aroused tax payers.

What about all the parents of children with rare illnesses that are in fact intelligent enough to read and understand research studies funded by their tax dollars?  Is it sufficient that they wait two weeks for an interlibrary loan of a journal article from their public library  or travel 75 miles to see a copy of a journal, if PMC did not exist?   I think 60 minutes is on this one already.

Any good historian knows that more than 70 years after the Maginot Line failed miserably to stop Germany’s invasion of France, debate still rages about whether the Line itself could be blamed for the incompetence of human actors.  Perhaps the Line did everything it was supposed to do, in spite of not being able to counter air power.   I found this message tonight in the battlefield of cyberspace:

I think I agree with noahWG.

Tags: AAP, Elsevier, Maginot Line, Research Works Act

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