One of the great promises of the internet was that information could be widely accessible to everyone at low or no cost. Anyone seeking knowledge could learn from low-cost but high-quality online resources. And while it may seem that everything is and has always been online, much of the 1,000-year publishing history of printed musical scores, scholarly journals, and scholarly books remains available only in libraries and archives.

In addition to making the vast history of human knowledge available online, the competing interests of publishers, authors, and consumers seem to be more at odds now than ever. Unlike the print environment, the digital environment works on technologies that make sharing easy. This change has been welcomed by consumers, but is a concern for publishers and some creators who worry that digital piracy will undermine their business model.

One ongoing development is the move to stop selling born-digital media to consumers and libraries. Concerned that digital content cannot be easily controlled, large publishers of books, music scores, and sound recordings continue to move to a leasing model. While this eases publisher concerns around piracy, it means that increasingly no one (including libraries) can collect and lend books or sound recordings.^[1] At the same time, individual musicians and authors are embracing new technology; they are leveraging our connected information world to develop collaborative models for publishing that favor artistic control and building relationships with their audiences.^[2]

Libraries, researchers, and creators are asking challenging questions as the future landscape for knowledge production and dissemination evolves:

• Who should own digital books, scores, or sound recordings?
• How do we maintain a record of our cultural history when libraries cannot collect books, articles, or sound recordings?
• What role should creators have in deciding how their work is published and shared with their audience?
• What is the value of collecting when digital media is platform dependent and publishers can modify or delete the content on those platforms at any time?
• What will the future of memory institutions or private collections be if publishers and copyright holders prevent individuals and institutions from preserving these resources for future generations of scholars?

Scholarly Publishing

Much like learning copyright basics, understanding some basics about publishing can help you understand the intersections between published works, copyright, and access to resources. Knowing how works are published can even help you understand how they’re organized online or in catalogs. As we discussed in Chapter 4: Preparing to Search, the kinds of search tools we have are a reflection of the way historical publishing practices have been adapted to online environments over time. For many, an ideal world wouldn’t even have online indexes: we would simply have digitized access to all knowledge created through human history.

In many ways, today’s online information environment specifically reflects Western European publishing practices. The first scholarly journals in Western Europe date back to the 17th Century.^[3] However, in China, a burgeoning publishing industry was active as early as 1030, when the government adopted block printing technology to distribute Confucian teachings widely.^[4] While publishing industries across the globe evolved differently, today, a scholarly publishing system that centers European traditions has become dominant. This includes a peer-review process that has not changed much since 1731, when the Royal Society of Edinburgh published the first peer-reviewed scholarly journal Medical Essays and Observations.^[5]

At this time, publishing involved significant labor and time. We can clearly see the time and labor investments in the traditional information life cycle: Newspapers with short articles that only required editorial review appeared first. Then came scholarly articles that required additional time in the publishing process for peer-review. Eventually, scholarly books that represent larger intellectual undertakings with longer review processes emerged. Before Wikipedia, you couldn’t see a topic in an encyclopedia until enough scholarly articles and books had been published to deem it worthy of inclusion. Even today, Wikipedia’s own editorial guidelines require content to be cited by published secondary sources, to be included on the website.

Before the advent of online publishing, publishers managed every aspect of the publication process except writing the actual scholarship and providing peer-reviews. Publishers had editorial boards that managed the process of selecting scholars who would peer-review the scholarly articles submitted by other scholars in their field. These peer-reviewers pointed out limitations to experiments; suggested other research that scholars should incorporate into their work; and made recommendations to the editors about whether the scholarship was good enough to publish. Publishers also hired designers, printers, and copy editors who made sure that these publications were error-free and ready for distribution. Scholarly articles were published together in issues that were sent to individual scholarly society members or subscribing libraries where they were available to researchers on a monthly, quarterly, or annual basis.

There was immense financial, labor, and time costs to this process. Scholarly articles were sent by mail to editors for consideration who then mailed them to peer-reviewers. The editors had to wait for those reviews to come back through the mail and return them to authors for revision. This process kept pace with technology, moving from handwriting to typewriters to computers. But in the early history of publishing, publishers had to make significant investments to cover the costs of postage, typesetting, and printing of these issues.

By the early 2000s, most publishers began moving their publications online and distributing articles in the portable document format, or PDF. In 2004, Google tried to index these publications hosted on scholarly publisher websites with a new tool called Google Scholar. With the launch of Google Scholar and publisher supported research databases and indexes, researchers no longer had to engage with an issue of a scholarly journal to access a single article. This is so common today that most novice researchers equate scholarly articles with PDFs because they have never interacted with them in any other format.

Understanding that scholarship was not always created as PDFs or posted on websites can be an important part of your research strategy. Accessing scholarly articles as single PDFs doesn’t change the fact that each article is part of an issue that comprises a volume of a scholarly journal. In Chapter 4: Preparing to Search, we examine many different search tools. Understanding the relationship between a scholarly article, an issue, a volume, and a scholarly journal will also help you understand what you should expect to find when using these search tools. For example, Music Index, which indexes articles across hundreds of publications from different publishers, is generally a digital representation of a print index and may not have PDFs of the articles you want to read. On the other end of the spectrum, Oxford University Press’ online database does include full-text content, but only from journals published by Oxford University Press. Knowing that you can find full text of Oxford scholarly journals on their platform can make finding an article you want to read easy. But Music Index is a better tool when you want to survey published scholarly articles across a topic that may have been published over time by a number of different publishers.

When you find yourself confused about which format a source might be available in or why you’re not finding it online in an index or database where you expected it to be, here’s what to do: Simplify your search process by stepping back to think through how it was originally made available and where a copyright holder or archive might continue to provide access.

Open Access

Traditionally, publishers charged subscription fees to cover the labor and materials necessary to publish print books and scholarly articles. Throughout history, scholars have provided peer-review services as well as their books and journal articles to publishers for free. Scholars are motivated to do this because it advances research in their field and demonstrates the value of their scholarship, an important part of securing tenure at a college or university. Profits have never been an important motivator for scholarly publishing. Historically, the fees for subscriptions have been paid by libraries motivated to ensure that researchers, students, and staff can read what other scholars are publishing.

Because scholars provide their work to publishers for free, you might think that a move to digital-only publishing and distribution platforms would become less expensive for scholars and libraries. In fact, many novice musician-scholars assume that publishers take advantage of the internet to make all of their published research available online for free.

However, as the University of California at San Francisco notes, costs of access to health sciences scholarly journals have increased by 87.5% since 2013.^[7] These costs have profound impacts to you as a musician-scholar and what you might access online. Wealthier institutions can provide more research access to their students and researchers.

This can mean longer wait times for students and researchers at smaller institutions. It can sometimes mean no access at all for independent musician-scholars. The University of Colorado-Boulder reports that an annual subscription to journals from the publisher Wiley costs more than buying a 92-foot luxury yacht.^[8] This means that few public libraries are able to provide these resources to their communities.

In 2001, a group of scholars who wanted to take advantage of the internet to share scholarship more quickly and freely met in Budapest to discuss how to make this a reality through open access publishing practices. This resulted in the Budapest Open Access Initiative (BOAI).^[9] This declaration was an important step that scholars took toward asserting that the research they freely contributed to the world should also be freely accessible to everyone. It was also the first time that open access was defined, declaring it was “economically feasible, that it gives readers extraordinary power to find and make use of relevant literature, and that it gives authors and their works vast and measurable new visibility, readership, and impact.”^[10]

Since the BOAI, scholars, libraries, and some publishers have been working together to identify ways to make more research open access. Many libraries now have institutional repositories where scholars can post fully edited versions of their work for students and their peers to access for free. Some libraries and publishers, including Project MUSE, are working together on new subscription models to make work openly accessible.^[11] There are also open access initiatives driven by the European Union and the United States. Most recently, the President of the United States instructed the Office of Science, Technology, and Policy (OSTP) to work with all federal agencies that fund research to formulate policies that would require all federally funded data and research to be made open access the first day of publication.^[12] This is critical in making more research accessible: in 2021, 55% of research in colleges and universities in the U.S. was funded by taxpayers in the form of federal grants.^[13]

About the author

name: Kathleen DeLaurenti

institution: The Peabody Institute of The Johns Hopkins University

website: https://peabody.jhu.edu/faculty/kathleen-delaurenti

Kathleen DeLaurenti is the Director of the Arthur Friedheim Library at the Peabody Institute of The Johns Hopkins University. She holds an MLIS from the University of Washington and a BFA in vocal performance from Carnegie Mellon University.

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