A Twitter-fueled furor erupted on Thursday after the Renaissance Society of America said that the database firm ProQuest had canceled the group’s subscription to a key collection of texts.
The controversy didn’t last long — by Thursday afternoon, ProQuest had apologized, and said that the society’s access to the material remained in place. But for many academics, the incident stoked familiar anxieties about the role of companies like ProQuest in the future of scholarly research and publishing.
The episode began on Wednesday, when the Renaissance scholars’ group asserted that ProQuest had ended the society’s subscription to a database called Early English Books Online, which is billed as the “definitive online collection of early printed works in English.” The society said it had a unique arrangement with ProQuest for two years, in which all of its members could use the collection. The arrangement was unconventional: Most of ProQuest’s subscriptions come from campus libraries, the Renaissance group said, and not scholarly societies.
“The basis for the cancellation is that our members make such heavy use of the subscription, this is reducing ProQuest’s potential revenue from library-based subscriptions,” the society’s executive committee said in a written statement. The committee said that the company had “decided for the moment not to include any learned societies as subscribers,” even as the society’s staff had negotiated with ProQuest for weeks, apparently to no avail.
Academics fumed as word of the society’s statement began to spread online. Unless their institutions already subscribed to the database, many of them said, they didn’t know how else they would be able to get access to the resources they need for their work. When research databases are controlled by for-profit companies, they worried, scholarship suffers.
On Thursday morning, the hashtags #ProQuestGate and #EEBOgate circulated on Twitter. Some researchers and academics criticized the company, while others posted advice on how to gain access to texts in the database without a subscription:
On Thursday afternoon, ProQuest released a written statement apologizing “for the confusion RSA members have experienced” about their access to the material.
“Rest assured that access to EEBO via RSA remains in place,” the statement continued. ProQuest did not specify whether a deal had actually been canceled, and did not comment to The Chronicle beyond its statement.
Barriers for Researchers
Many scholars were relieved at the news — the RSA’s executive committee said it was “delighted” to share ProQuest’s statement with members. But it was also clear that the episode had touched a nerve among those who think about the future of scholarly research.
“What really enrages me about this is not that ProQuest is for-profit — although that is of course a major aspect of what’s going on,” said Rachel E. Clark, an assistant professor of English at Wartburg College, on Thursday morning. “The problem is that by prioritizing profits over access it is really contributing to major barriers for the research in the field.”
Ms. Clark is writing a book on disability in early modern England, and when she heard that the Renaissance Society offered access to Early English Books Online, she signed up. She uses the database to search for texts that mention disabilities like blindness or limb amputation, and she prefers to use texts in their original edition.
But traveling in order to use rare first-edition books costs money, she said. Using the database, she can find the original texts online. She can see the illustrations and read the marginalia.
“For all of us that are at small liberal-arts colleges,” she said, “the database is so expensive that our libraries cannot afford to provide institutional access.”
After word of ProQuest’s statement emerged, Ms. Clark took to her blog to call the development “good news.” But she wrote that the company’s “quick about-face” highlighted “the need for a better open-source alternative” to the collection.
Bethany Nowviskie, director of the Digital Library Federation and a research associate professor of digital humanities at the University of Virginia, shared Ms. Clark’s concerns. But she hoped the controversy would lead to a focused discussion on private companies’ role in academe.
“It’s a clear reminder that the private companies to which we have ceded control of our shared cultural heritage do not have scholars’ best interests at heart,” she said in an email to The Chronicle.
When academics use privately held databases, she added, the texts that they’ll find depend on the terms of their subscription. If two academics run an identical search, they might get different results.
“Your database subscription level, and all the invisible machinery between you and what should be public-domain information, determines what you can see, and therefore what you can say about the past,” she said.
After Ms. Nowviskie saw ProQuest’s statement, she urged colleagues to remember the controversy.
The conversation on social media among researchers and faculty members continued to reverberate. They seemed shaken by the incident, and many continued to suggest alternatives to relying on private databases.
“Only greater collective action by faculty and librarians can break the commercial monopoly on our shared cultural heritage,” Ms. Nowviskie said in her email to The Chronicle. “ProQuest owns none of the books in its database: we all do, together.”