Harvard Business Publishing has angered librarians with an aggressive new tactic designed to increase its revenue from Harvard Business Review articles assigned in courses—or, as the publisher would put it, insisting on proper payments that business schools have been evading. Those articles, typically readable summaries of academic work geared toward practitioners, are a staple of the business-school curriculum.
Although Harvard Business Review articles have been included in the journal aggregator EBSCO since 2000, as of August 1 the publisher began blocking full access to the 500 most popular articles, meaning students and professors can no longer download, print, or link directly to them. Harvard has long asserted that a digital library subscription cannot substitute for the separate licenses and fees involved when the articles are assigned in courses. Yet it says it has encountered widespread abuse of that policy, with professors referring students to the digital subscriptions.
To restore the linking ability, some of the largest business-school libraries have received quotes of roughly $200,000 annually—a number the publisher, a nonprofit subsidiary of Harvard University, confirms—although the press says the average quote is below $10,000. Alternatively, business schools can pay for journal articles that are assigned in class on an à-la-carte basis or under various “umbrella” plans. Those latter arrangements have long existed. (Some business schools already have expansive licensing arrangements with Harvard that mean they are unaffected.)
Joshua Gans, a professor of business at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management (whose e-book Information Wants to Be Shared was published last year by Harvard Business Review Press), drew attention to the dispute with an October blog post, at Digitopoly, charging that Harvard Business Publishing was flirting with “evil” behavior. Shouldn’t one expensive electronic subscription be enough?, he asked Harvard, he wrote, “is violating a norm in academia so obvious that I didn’t ever have to think much about it.”
There and in a subsequent opinion piece for the Financial Times, he suggested that, as punishment, the Financial Times no longer count publication in the Harvard Business Review when assessing business-school faculties. (The Rotman school, for now, has decided not to pay the higher EBSCO fee but rather to buy the journal’s articles on a per-student basis.)
‘Being Held Hostage’
As it happens, many librarians agree with Mr. Gans’s general point, if not his remedy. On October 28, business-reference librarians within the American Library Association approved a statement that the press’s “profit-driven practices diverge from the intent of scholarly communication and impinge on higher education and libraries’ core social mission to preserve and make accessible records of scholarship.”
“There’s a feeling of being held hostage: In order to get back the access you have enjoyed for over a decade, you have to pay these additional fees,” said Andy Spackman, a business librarian at the Marriott School of Management at Brigham Young University and chair of the business-reference librarians’ group.
Harvard Business Publishing has responded that, in essence, nothing has changed in its approach to providing the journal. “It has always been the norm to charge for [HBR] content when it’s used for teaching purposes rather than research,” e-mailed Brian Kenny, a spokesman for the Harvard Business School, speaking for the press. The new licenses, he explained, serve as a new way to meet that goal, and preserve the ability to create valuable content, as the landscape of publishing shifts. (One byproduct of the shift, he and others noted, is that the higher EBSCO fees fall on libraries while course-pack fees fall directly on business schools.)
The press first made moves in this direction in 2009, approaching some number of business schools in the United States and Britain—30, according to a 2009 Library Journal article—and offering the higher-priced EBSCO license, in the context of allegedly flouted course-license fees. About 15 universities signed on, Harvard now says. Others declined and had some of their linking abilities turned off.
One question is whether business schools will assign fewer Harvard Business Review articles as a result of the shift. Mr. Gans wrote that his dean in Toronto had asked the faculty to at least consider alternatives because of the potential for high per-article fees. And will anyone challenge Harvard on copyright grounds? So far, no one dares to do so directly. One British librarian who did not want to be named said that his library declines, as a matter of principle, to pay fees beyond EBSCO, even as professors continue to assign Harvard Business Review articles, as always.